Synthetic Literature: Writing Science Fiction in a Co-Creative Process

Abstract

This paper describes a co-creative text generation system applied within a science fiction setting to be used by an established novelist. The project was initiated as part of The Dutch Book Week, and the generated text will be published within a volume of science fiction stories. We explore the ramifications of applying Natural Language Generation within a cocreative process, and examine where the cocreative setting challenges both writer and machine. We employ a character-level language model to generate text based on a large corpus of Dutch novels that exposes a number of tunable parameters to the user. The system is used through a custom graphical user interface, that helps the writer to elicit, modify and incorporate suggestions by the text generation system. Besides a literary work, the output of the present project also includes user-generated meta-data that is expected to contribute to the quantitative evaluation of the text-generation system and the co-creative process involved.