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GRIOT’s Tales of Haints and Seraphs: A Computational Narrative Generation System

D. Fox Harrell considers what is computational about composition, and describes the GRIOT system for generating literary texts.

Editors’ Introduction to “Computational Fictions”

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The conversion of the previously noncomputational into the computational evokes the debates over AI that, in his book The Mystery of Consciousness, John Searle succinctly summarizes and participates in. Searle’s position is that computational processes cannot simulate consciousness.

The conversion of the previously noncomputational into the computational evokes the debates over AI that, in his book The Mystery of Consciousness, John Searle succinctly summarizes and participates in. Searle’s position is that computational processes cannot simulate consciousness.

‐ Ben Underwood

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The gloss provided by Ben Underwood echoes, rather than disputes, the approach taken in the work described here. Various critiques of the capacity of computing technologies to represent many everyday aspects of human cognition, much less consciousness, are well known. The work here acknowledges such limitations and embraces critical perspectives of AI such as provided by Searle, Winograd and Flores, Agre, and others. The goal of the GRIOT system is not to model consciousness. It is not full system autonomy or machine competence at a Turing-test style for story generation.

The gloss provided by Ben Underwood echoes, rather than disputes, the approach taken in the work described here. Various critiques of the capacity of computing technologies to represent many everyday aspects of human cognition, much less consciousness, are well known. The work here acknowledges such limitations and embraces critical perspectives of AI such as provided by Searle, Winograd and Flores, Agre, and others. The goal of the GRIOT system is not to model consciousness. It is not full system autonomy or machine competence at a Turing-test style for story generation. Rather, when addressing issues of human subjectivity my goal is to allow *human* authors to use formalization as a form of meaningful expression, one that enables content that variable along some dimensions (e.g. narrative or poetic structure) while variable along others (e.g. affective tone, theme, metaphorical exposition). Meaning arises from situated, embodied, and distributed human interpretation, not from the system itself. The GRIOT approach means that digital media authors/artists can begin to think about their software in a new way – just as a goal of higher level programming languages is to allow computer scientists to think in terms of problems and solutions as opposed to algorithmic steps, a goal of the GRIOT approach is to allow higher level digital media arts authorship where the author specifies a range of improvisational interactions to be meaningfully completed by a user rather than designing every interaction explicitly.

‐ D. Fox Harrell

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