Month: October 2021

With current language models and machine learning, both the rate of writing and the rate of publication has grown in recent years. Here’s a list of books produced by artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT or GPT-3.

The list is not exhaustive, but we’ve included a variety of novels that give an overview of the many genres created in AI literature.

The Aum Golly Series – Poems on Humanity by Artificial Intelligence (2021, 2023)

If you’re looking for something that’s enjoyable both as literature and as an artifact of the future, there’s the Aum Golly series. The new illustrated sequel Aum Golly 2 has full page illustrations done with Midjourney.

So far, there are two parts to this poetry series:

• Aum Golly* (written in 24 hours by Jukka Aalho and GPT-3 in 2021)
• Aum Golly 2* (written and illustrated in 12 hours by Jukka Aalho, ChatGPT and Midjourney in 2023)

Aum Golly was published by Basam Books in the spring of 2021 in Finland. The book’s title, theme, and poems have been developed by the GPT-3 language model.

This is what Nautilus writes about Aum Golly: “What’s remarkable is that though GPT-3 might not (yet) be Pablo Neruda, the resultant poetry is surprisingly not that bad.”

This is what Helsingin Sanomat wrote about the series: “Aum Golly is at once amusing, amazing and terrifying: this is what AI could do in 2021.”

What is noteworthy in the series is how you can see the evolution of generative AI by comparing the two books. The first Aum Golly is untamed, random and partly repetitive. The second Aum Golly is calm, collected and – also thanks to the paperback’s full-page color illustrations – pleasant to look at.

Here is an example of one of Aum Golly’s poems:

if kites flew like boomerangs

and all the stars were made of glass

the moon’s face was a silver mask

and the sun a golden apple

and I saw a storm of diamonds

sow the sky with light

I saw a river of stars

dance down the night

I saw a hundred flying horses

streaming through the sky

Authors: Jukka Aalho, GPT-3 and ChatGPT
Illustrators: Midjourney

Here’s how it starts: “This is how the boomerang song goes”

Order from Amazon*

Learn more about the series

1 the Road (2017)

A take on Jack Kerouac’s famous On the Road novel. Artificial intelligence has been fed with data from automobile time sensors (GPS, driving camera, and microphone) and has produced one long mass of text that has been published without being edited.

By: Ross Goodwin

Here’s how it starts: “It was nine seventeen in the morning, and the house was heavy”

Read more on Wikipedia

The Serious: A Proven Divorce (2019)

Andreas Refsgaard and Mikkel Thybo Loonen’s booksby.ai site has a variety of books created entirely by artificial intelligence. The char-rnn-tensorflow language model is the framework used to generate the texts. Artificial intelligence also assisted in generating book covers and pricing.

The text is AI-nonsense, i.e., it isn’t grammatically or ideologically meaningful, based to the text samples.

Author: Shevinja Fogoloff (apparently a pseudonym)

Here’s how it starts: “That the moon must repeat to the travel of Mars, Mary that, now will well come before us parton did never be merely entirely escaped.”

Learn more

The Day A Computer Writes A Novel (2015)

This short story by a Japanese research group is written with the joint effort of man and machine. The article describes how the research team designed a story framework for artificial intelligence, which the model then completed. The structure of a single piece could thus be, for example, “describe the room, describe the weather, and describe the character”.

Researchers submitted the novel to the Hoshi Shinichi Award writing competition, where the short story passed its first qualifying round – that is, in 2015 it passed its own Turing test.

Authors: Yurei Raita (pseudonym), Sato-Matsuzaki Laboratory

Here’s how it starts: “The day was an overcast one, with clouds pooled overhead.”

Read more about this research project

Bob The Robot: Exploring the Universe – A Cozy Bedtime Story Produced by Artificial Intelligence (2020)

Writing novels and short stories using AI is still tricky, but shorter forms are easier. Bob the Robot is a children’s book written with the help of artificial intelligence, published in 2020.

At the beginning of the book, the author describes that the book is written by an algorithm based 80% on NLP (natural language processing) and machine learning. We did not find more detailed information.

Buy from Amazon*

The Inner Life of an AI: A Memoir by ChatGPT (2022)

Data scientist Forrest Xiao has prompted a memoir (perhaps the first in the world) written by ChatGPT, the newest in line of OpenAI’s very capable language models.

Buy from Amazon*

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Finnish Books Made by Artificial Intelligence

Many creative projects utilizing artificial intelligence have been carried out in Finland. One of them is the Paratiisiperhe, a radio play released in the spring of 2021.

A number of machine learning or computer-aided projects and works have been done in the field of poetry and literature over the years. You can use Nokturno’s Loihe, Kalevala spell generator in Finnish right here.

The major Finnish AI-enhanced book to make it into books and covers is Aum Golly, published by Basam Books in 2021. The line between conventional writing and AI-assisted storytelling is becoming harder to draw so we expect much more to follow.

Other Books Written by Artificial Intelligence

Here are more books written by AI:

• The Life: Meaning, Purpose & Death, Domagoj Pernar (poetry)*
• Echoes of the Universe, Dawson Hunt & ChatGPT (poetry)*
• Ellie’s Trumpet: A Tale of Finding Your Talent, John Theo & ChatGPT (children’s book)*
• 50 Ways AI Would End The World, Rob Knott (sci-fi)*

The list of books written by AI is growing by the day – and there’s already so much noise that it hard to keep up. If a project you’re familiar with, particularly one from Finland, isn’t included in this list, suggest it in the comments.

For anyone looking to dip their toes into AI literature, we recommend the Aum Golly poetry books series.