Can a robot write books? Yes, and they're absolutely terrible.

1) old news.

2) give it time...

The New York Times ran a more detailed story a few years ago about a computer programmer somewhere in Southern California who had thousands of titles on Amazon written by a Perl script. As that article explained, certain large libraries buy just about any title published. It was effectively a scam to get these institutions to pony up a couple hundred dollars each for bound copies of Wikipedia copypasta.

RACTER was a hoax. It was basically a fill-in-the-blanks program using templates that the author, William Chamberlain, fed it. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/RACTER

I worked on a natural language processing project as my required directed study in college. We focused on language generation and took an extremely naïve approach to the problem since it turns out that literature on alternative types of language generation (as opposed to simple generation from n-grams) is not well-proliferated.

Needless to say, it was very hard. Semantic representation by itself is very difficult to tackle; AI in general far off from simulating the wit and ingenuity of a human being's writing, though I don't believe it will be like that forever.

For the curious: we didn't get very far into the project, but our next move was going to be trying to combine WordNet, FrameNet, and VerbNet to create stories that sounded like they described something plausible. We only got a bit past "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," though.

It's something that I say I want to hack on again someday, but I don't know if I will. The two of us have other code projects right now.

I think you look into too much the word "book".

The books you're thinking is a type of content. But if you look at book as a delivery technology (a stack of paper together) then its perfectly reasonable to have generated books, just like you have generated pdf reports with generated charts and graphs.

To make the kind of book you and I think of as content (novels, investigative journalism, etc...) using a pure AI/machine approach is still a bit away.

Personally, I'm experimenting AI + human solution to create the kind of books most people would want to read.

You are probably referring to this man.

"Philip M. Parker (born June 20, 1960) holds the INSEAD Chair Professorship of Management Science at INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France). He has patented a method to automatically produce a set of similar books from a template which is filled with data from database and internet searches.[1] At Amazon.com, Parker is listed as the author of 107,000 books that his program created and overall he claims to have produced 200,000 different titles.[2][3] This would make him one of the most prolific authors in the world. Parker publishes the automated books through ICON Group International, using several ICON group subheadings. Via EdgeMaven Media, he also provides applications for firms from different business domains to create their own computer-authored content material.[4][5]"

See: * http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/business/media/14link.html... * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_M._Parker