Not exactly about authors and writing, but PG found this interesting.
From Artificial Lawyer:
Tom Martin, the founder of legal bot maker, LawDroid, has been awarded a contract to build a voice-activated legal aid bot in the US in a major ‘real world’ test of the technology and its access to justice (A2J) capabilities.
Martin told Artificial Lawyer that it will be the first chat bot/legal bot funded by the Legal Services Corporation’s Technology Initiative Grant Program.
. . . .
‘LawDroid will be making a hybrid voice and text-based chatbot that can engage users in guided interviews, provide vital legal information and generate custom legal documents,’ Martin explained.
. . . .
[T]he bot will need to handle a variety of legal queries coming to the HELP4TN site, which can range from wills to divorce and from financial planning to employment disputes. It will also need to function via voice and text. And, it will also need to be able to help users complete basic forms.
. . . .
The system must also be able to cope with verbal and written input errors, again no small challenge as anyone who has used a chat bot will know. Getting a bot to deal with responses from the user that make no sense yet without running into a dead end, or a logic loop, is not easy. But, such challenges have to be overcome to make the bot function in the real world, where people will introduce typos, misspellings, or use the wrong terms and other errors.
The system must also allow users to have ‘a conversational interview’ with the bot to automatically complete forms. Again, while this may sound relatively straight forward, ensuring that the right information is gathered and inputted in the right places, in the right way, is also not a simple task, especially if operating primarily via voice and with a member of the public who may not be familiar with legal terms or the legal process they are in need of help with.
In short, this will be a very important test that will provide a great proof of concept that legal bots can be used by the Legal Services Corporation and the many entities it supports.
Link to the rest at Artificial Lawyer
In the US, the Legal Services Corporation is an independent nonprofit established by Congress in 1974 to provide financial support for civil legal aid to low-income Americans. It provides most of its services through independent Legal Aid organizations in all 50 states.
In a former life, PG did a lot of litigation for his local Legal Aid. Some of his favorites were big company vs. little gal/guy lawsuits. He’ll resist the urge to share war stories.
PG has always been intrigued with legal automation and has done some work in that area over the years. Any legal process that employs commonly-used document structures or standard forms is an excellent candidate for computerized document creation.
Chapter 7 automated bankruptcy forms for individuals were an early example of complex forms that followed generally well-defined structures and processes. One very nice advantage of even relatively crude bankruptcy automation was that all the numbers added up which was not always the case with forms created manually.
As far as lawyers being replaced by computers, PG’s demurely humble opinion is that if a lawyer can be replaced by a computer program, that lawyer needs to move up to more complex legal tasks.
Another interesting use of AI in writing is the potential creation of formulaic potboiler stories.
Here’s an article about NaNoGenMo – National Novel Generation Month – for computer-generated novels on the Verge:
Nick Montfort’s World Clock was the breakout hit of last year (2013). A poet and professor of digital media at MIT, Montfort used 165 lines of Python code to arrange a new sequence of characters, locations, and actions for each minute in a day. He gave readings, and the book was later printed by the Harvard Book Store’s press. Still, Kazemi says reading an entire generated novel is more a feat of endurance than a testament to the quality of the story, which tends to be choppy, flat, or incoherent by the standards of human writing.
. . . .
Narrative is one of the great challenges of artificial intelligence. Companies and researchers are working to create programs that can generate intelligible narratives, but most of them are restricted to short snippets of text. The company Narrative Science, for example, makes programs that take data from sporting events or financial reports, highlight the most significant information, and arrange it using templates pre-written by humans. It’s not the loveliest prose, but it’s fairly accurate and very fast.
NanNoGenMo, Kazemi says, “is more about doing something that is entertaining to yourself and possibly to other people.”
For last year’s NaNoGenMo Kazemi generated “Teens Wander Around a House.” He made a bunch of artificial intelligence agents and had them meander through a house at random, his program narrating their actions. When two characters ended up in a room together, he pulled dialogue from Twitter. One tweet could be a question — “What’s for dinner tomorrow?” — and the next, a statement that also contained the word “dinner” — “Dinner is my favorite meal of the day,” for example. “The result was a conversation that sort of stayed on topic but didn’t make much sense,” he says.
Link to the rest at the Verge.
Here’s more on the same topic at Sabotage Reviews:
NaNoGenMo happens where tech and literature overlap: the strange venn intersection that houses computer poetry, electronic literature, and twitterbots. Novel generation draws from artificial intelligence and the quest to create computers that talk or write like people, but it’s also part of the Oulipian tradition of writing from constraint: if you make such-and-such a ruleset, what kind of writing might happen? Computer generation renders Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes beautiful but obsolete, and to my mind poem.exe can hold a 1000 Watt LED candle to Bashō.
NaNoGenMo is not, however, truly about trying to replace the human author. Rather, its entries draw their strange beauty and humour from their failure to be human, from their almost-but-not-quite humanity and their utter inhumanity: most of them are transparently machine-made, but this lends their glitches, coincidences and almost-epiphanies even more fascinating. The writing they produce is closest to is the flattened affect and repetitions of alt-lit, with dashes of uncreative writing, flarf and other post-internet poetics. In other words: as humans increasingly write in dialogue with the internet and machine automations, machines are increasingly being written in dialogue with human literature.
With all that in mind, here are ten of my favourite results from NaNoGenMo. Each is gorgeous and weird in a different way, from extended jokes to eerie half-humanness.
Link to the rest at Sabotage Reviews
Here’s a link to the 2017 NaNoGenMo site on Github
If you are still interested in computer-generated literature, here’s a recent talk:
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As far as the “computers writing fiction” part of this post goes, I think the observation that all writing is rule based (though often using very complex, nested rules) gets it about right. Computers penning enjoyable, readable (not necessarily great) fiction within the next 30 years or so is a real possibility.
I recently wrote an article about this subject here: http://tunaforbernadette.tumblr.com/post/168231769951/no-humans-required-exploring-the-possibility-of
I’ll have to pass this post on to my lawyer nephew.
A very interesting article particularly since I’ve been researching robotics for a scene at the climax of my current story. Robots are becoming more sophisticated all the time. Even service industries are at risk. There are already robotic bartenders in Las Vegas, for instance. And the people replaced by robots won’t find jobs building robots because the robots will also be doing those jobs. It makes me wonder how unskilled and semi-skilled workers will make a living soon. While I can’t guess what shape the new economy will take, I firmly believe we’re on the verge of an shift on a scale similar to what happened when feudalism disappeared.
It makes me wonder how unskilled and semi-skilled workers will make a living soon.
Economies are based on trade. One party trades with another. It’s interesting to consider various models where robots proliferate.
What will the human trade to get the products made by the robots? What will the entrepreneur gain by building a flock of robots that produce stuff?
Lots of permutations and fodder for SciFi writers. Joe looks at the new levitation scooter, but has nothing to trade for it. Tom looks at his overflowing inventory of levitation scooters and can’t find anyone to trade with.
There is an incredibly complex network of trade at all levels that supports a modern economy. It took thousands of years to build. You can’t just order up a new one.
instead of clinging to what are probably lower-paying and less complicated aspects of the legal trade.
There’s often a lot of money in those lower paying aspects. I’ve watched a judge marry ten couples over lunch at $50 each.
As far as lawyers being replaced by computers, PG’s demurely humble opinion is that if a lawyer can be replaced by a computer program, that lawyer needs to move up to more complex legal tasks.
Sure. But I notice in some places lawyers are fighting pretty hard against even allowing government clerks to give people the proper form for a particular need. Robots will be fighting attorneys for the easy money. As always, follow the money.
I haven’t followed the latest news on the lawyers vs. the clerks, but, in similar situations I’ve observed before, nobody has much sympathy for the lawyers and either the legislature or a judge backs the clerks. For the record, I have zero sympathy for the lawyers in that kind of situation.
I wonder at the overall competence of a lawyer who feels they must restrict access to forms–why do they think they need to fight to retain control of that minor aspect of the law when it would surely be easier (in terms of stress), less time consuming, and probably more lucrative to go on to more difficult tasks their education makes them particularly suited for? Were I they, I’d far rather invest in further education and focus on aspects of the law wherein my services offer the layperson the particular aid they require at a price commensurate with my skills, experience, and education, instead of clinging to what are probably lower-paying and less complicated aspects of the legal trade.
Good points, Ashe.
In many urban areas, there are probably more lawyers (at least in certain specialties) than the local economy can support. The ones that are on the financial borderline are worried about getting enough new clients to keep the bills paid. They view citizens who obtain help in filling out forms from a clerk as potential clients, not just for filling out the form, but for follow-on work, related or unrelated to the form in question.
When an attorney is sitting in his/her office without enough clients to keep the lights on, he/she may make poor decisions.
Sometimes, such attorneys can motivate the local bar association to support a prohibition on the clerks providing such assistance.
There is a flip side to the argument in that, while some clerks are highly competent, others may provide poor advice simply because their competence is of a limited scope and some actions which make sense to the clerk may have an impact on the citizen that falls outside the area the clerk knows well. Generally speaking, however, a competent government organization can educate clerks about what forms they can help with and what forms (or parts of forms) for which the clerks should not provide advice.
I don’t handle litigation any more, but when I did, I always made a point to stay on good terms with court clerks and their staff. On more than one occasion a clerk would alert me to a local change in back-office procedure that I might not have known about otherwise.