Can Artificial Intelligence Write Stories for us – Good Ones? By: Rayne Hall Artificial Intelligence (AI) computer programmes can create amazing works of visual art.  Can they write great novels and short stories, too? The makers of AI writing apps claim that they can. I wanted to test this myself, so I subscribed to several AI apps.   AI apps are mostly used to write promo texts – sales emails, social media posts and such. But many have a ‘fiction’ or ‘creative story’ function.  You enter a brief description of your idea, and the app produces a creative plot and turns it into a story. It sounds intriguing, doesn’t it? While I would never delegate my creative process to a machine, I wondered if an AI app could become a ‘collaborator’. I tried using AI it turn my ideas into first drafts, and to polish my rough drafts into sparkling manuscripts.   Did it work? The short answer: ‘No.’    Here’s the more detailed answer:   Five Serious Flaws   When I described my idea, most apps didn’t come up with plots.  They just padded out my idea-paragraph with additional words and sentences.   A few came up with plots – daft ones, not stories worth reading. Although some generated promising beginnings, they couldn’t sustain a plot. The middles lacked power and the endings were always lame. The contained no climax, and they didn’t answer the story question posed in the beginning. Many were the dreaded ‘deus-ex-machina’ endings, others were simply implausible. Not a single ending was memorable and satisfying.     The language was simplistic, sometimes infantile – the kind of writing you get when a ten-year-old writes a story.    The writing style was appalling, containing all the flaws of beginner writers’ early efforts: clichéd phrases, tautologies, passive voice,…

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