Almost everyone I know, is completely obsessed with Game of Thrones, all with their own theories and speculation about what events will occur, who will die and ultimately who will end up on the Iron Throne. Interestingly, AI has got an opinion too.
I read an article today about a software engineer, Zak Thoutt, who has used a neural network to ‘predict’ (as he calls it) the events of the sixth book in the series. He gave his system a corpus of the first five books to analyse and learn from, before setting it the task of writing itself and the result was… well, rather disappointing.
Although, the AI did indeed create something interesting to say the least, the text was difficult to read, with very little grammatical structure. It also lacked the ability to know if characters are alive or dead nor how to present certain aspects of their characteristics which left a lot to be desired. This however, is understandably difficult to implement in a complex computationally creative system, like this one.
As an example of the above Hodor completely destroys the one thing that makes his character so renowned in Thoutt’s work:
“Hodor looked at them bellowing, “which road you should be home.””
If you’re unfamiliar with Game of Thrones *rings bell in shame*, Hodor is a character who only ever says “Hodor”, making this line extremely unlikely and rather immersion-breaking.
Nevertheless, this AI does present some interesting and well worded opinions. It has predicted that Jamie will kill Cersei
“Jaime killed Cersei”
and Daenerys will be poisoned by, close friend, Varys
“Varys poisoned Daenerys and another of the dead men.”
Personally, I feel that this had potential, however, training it to both learn English and write with the same corpus is the AI’s downfall. If the system had instead used a collection of text with simpler language to train grammar structures, prior to moving onto learning the characters and plot of the five Game of Thrones book, I feel the system would have been much more successful in terms of readability. This still won’t solve the issue about characters aliveness being confused, or their mannerisms portrayed poorly, but would definitely have made it better.
But then again, who knows! Maybe the AI has picked up on things that the rest of us have completely missed and its predictions will be bang on!
If you want to have a read, check it out on GitHub!