The thing is the majority of what humans consume is so structured [tv procedurals, romance/SF/fantasy novels, superhero comics, news, etc, ad nauseam] is so tightly structured you don't even need an AI to generate it, even just a markov generator will do it most of the time (someone had a project that generated quotes indistinguishable from 50 Shades of Grey). They'd already written screenplays on computers at MIT in the 60s. But even the high-end isn't saved; if Burroughs were alive today and in his 20s-30s, he'd probably being using computers for a modern generated 'cut-up' technique. Really, Dada was just ahead of the curve by a century.
You're not going to get a (remotely decent) novel out of a Markov chain text generator unless you're using tuples so long that you're just regurgitating an existing novel.
Not Markov chain, but I have been wondering about Dwarf Fortress. Some stories of Dwarf Fortress sound quite interesting. So I wonder if an automated writeup of an automated Dwarf Fortress game could yield something worthwhile.
>You're not going to get a (remotely decent) novel
An actual implementation of such would be wonky?[1] Yes. But decent is a relative word. People are quite willing to put up with a lotta issue to get what they want. (The churn of quick-shift material in the self-publishing world is enough to demonstrate this.)
But, in relation to the nature of text vs video as I mentioned in another comment, the integrity of the written word probably doesn't matter. If video dominates, the words needed in a script need be no more than a generalized layout of plot-points filled with a bit of ad lib and improvisation. (Given the nature of so much 'reality tv' you don't even need that, simply impress the images and arrange them to the pre-defined consumer-expected structure.)
We really overestimate the importance of the novel. Tweets could be generated easily (and are), and such snippets, I'll argue, are to most-consumed scriptorial content. And visual media predominates. The novels that have wide-ranging effects are things like Dan Brown, which are structured in just such the way as they are much easier than would be suspected to be systematized (As most people will admit: he's really good at writing the same book over and over again).
And the people who care about 'remotely decent novels' beyond their own engagement are few and far between. They have no mainstream cultural value (in the US) beyond shock value.
[This is not to be taken as me knocking novels. Also, I may be too US-centric, but I doubt the rest of humanity is any less dominated by the arresting nature of the visual, or, again, they interact heavily through messaging apps that count in the snippet category.]
>regurgitating an existing novel
That's what most media is. (Which is not to be taken as a slam; a given culture has to repeat or it's not a culture.)
[1] Am I going to absolutely bet on that it would work? No. But I've done some work in this area, and I still will contend the distance between theory and praxis is much smaller than anyone wants to admit. The tooling would be much simpler than a full-blown AI.
