Ross Goodwin drove from New York to New Orleans in March 2017 with an AI in a laptop that was connected to different sensors. The AI took the data from the sensors and turned it into words that were printed on rolls of receipt paper. He did this to copy Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Jean Boite Éditions came out with the book in 2018.

Goodwin didn't change the text at all. Even though he thought the writing was "choppy" and had typos, he wanted to present the text exactly as it was made by the computer so that it could be studied in the future. "It was 9:17 in the morning, and the house was heavy," the story starts.

What is the idea?

In March 2017, Ross Goodwin took an AI with a long short-term memory recurrent neural network from New York to New Orleans. He did this to copy Jack Kerouac's book "On the Road." Three sensors got information from the real world: a surveillance camera on the trunk watched the scenery go by, a microphone picked up what people were saying inside the car, and the Global Positioning System (GPS) tracked where the car was. The AI program was fed information from these sources and the time from the computer's internal clock. The program then printed sentences on rolls of receipt paper.

The car was a Cadillac. Goodwin said later that he wanted a "powerful" car, like a Crown Vic, but couldn't get one. He was also worried that people might think he was a terrorist if they saw all the electronics and wires in the car. Google helped pay for it because it liked what Goodwin was doing at New York University. Five other people went with him, including his sister and fiancee. A film crew followed the Cadillac and made a documentary about the four-day trip. Lewis Rapkin was in charge of the documentary.

How did the machine write it?

The AI program had been taught to read fiction to get ready for the trip to write a novel. Goodwin fed it three text corpora with about 20 million words each: one with poetry, one with science fiction, and one with what Goodwin called "bleak" writing. It had also been given a set of data from Foursquare. The AI used the Foursquare data to recognize places and add comments to them. The car conversations that were recorded were changed in some way. The GPS locations were typed out word for word to start the day's writing.

Letter by letter, the AI made up the novel. Because the GPS and time clock are always giving information, the novel often talks about the latitude, longitude, and time of day. It was printed without being edited, so Goodwin says it is "choppy." He kept the typos because he wanted to show the text "in its most raw form." He thinks the AI is smart enough to write literature, but he still feels responsible for guiding it and owning what it writes. Goodwin says that the main reason he wrote this book was to show how machines make words: "When this text gets more complicated in the future, it will be a warning. If it has these kinds of patterns, it may not have been written by a person ".

Conclusion

Rooted in the traditions of American literature, gonzo journalism, and the latest research in artificial neural networks, “1 the Road” forces a new reflection on the place and authority of the author in a new age of machines. When you read “1 The Road”, it will be a lot like going on a road trip. If the car is the pen, then reading “1 The Road” is kind of like sitting in the shotgun seat.

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