The Russian publishing house Individuum has released the world’s first collection of short stories written by a human co-authored with a neural network. The authors of the book “Trying to wake up” are the writer and artist Pavel Pepperstein and his digital “double”, trained by Sber specialists.
Of the 24 stories in the collection, half belong to Pepperstein, the other half were generated by the ruGPT-3 neural network, additionally trained on Pavel’s stories and fragments of his interview.
As explained in the press service of Bookmate, artificial intelligence created texts in several passes, using intermediate settings and additional training in classical literature. The selection of ready-made texts of the neural network was carried out by the writer and editor-in-chief of Individuum Felix Sandalov. At the same time, the essays of the neural network are offered to the reader in the form in which she wrote them.
“Honestly, I didn’t feel like there was any resemblance between my stories and the stories written by Neuro Pepperstein. Nevertheless, I liked Neuro Pepperstein’s stories , ”said the writer. According to the author, the texts written by the neural network reminded him of Werner Herzog’s film “Heart of Glass”, where all the actors play under hypnosis. “The state of hypnosis in which they are all immersed makes these completely different people somewhat similar to each other. I got the feeling that artificial intelligence is also in such an unawakened state, in a state of hypnosis or confusion, it sleeps and works in a dream, but there is an underlying desire for awakening, a desire for awakening. Therefore, the book is called “Trying to wake up” ,” the author added.
The collection came out with a holographic cover featuring two paintings. One was written by Pepperstein, the second was the ruDALL-E neural network, which had previously studied the artist’s work, created by SberDevices and Sber AI with the assistance of SberCloud. The paper version of Trying to Wake Up will hit bookstores by the end of May, and the digital edition is available on Bookmate starting today.
