Lovebot 9000 pens RITA winner, destroys all humans

Gleaned from the fantastic annals (*titter*) of Smart Bitches:

Meet Philip Parker: author of 200,000 books, written mostly by computers.

The skinny: Dude apparently writes computer algorithms to generate books and prints them on demand for things like medical libraries. An excerpt from the NYTimes article, if you will:

If this sounds like cheating to the layman’s ear, it does not to Mr. Parker, who holds some provocative — and apparently profitable — ideas on what constitutes a book. While the most popular of his books may sell hundreds of copies, he said, many have sales in the dozens, often to medical libraries collecting nearly everything he produces. He has extended his technique to crossword puzzles, rudimentary poetry and even to scripts for animated game shows.

And he is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. “I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”

Now, not to be an elitist snob, but, um, isn't that cheating? Furthermore, hasn't it already been done?

Not that I have anything against our robot masters or those who wrongly think they can control them. Not when we have Autocrit, an editing wizard you can use to read through your work to check for overused words, sentence length variation, repeated phrases, homonyms, and more. Or Kuka (pictured above), which generates copies of the Martin Luther Bible in a lovely calligraphic script, giving thousands of monks time to kick back and chant. Oh, and let's not forget Margaret Atwood's LongPen telautograph machine. How many author's arms have we saved with that?

At this point, I'm supposed to go into some long but quirky diatribe about the value of a good writer and the words they put to paper. I'm supposed to say something intelligent about how the Hollywood writers' strike should have aptly demonstrated the need for good writers in a broad spectrum of media.

Unfortunately, my BlogBot 2000 decided to cack out on me and come up with some word salad instead. And I'm just too damn lazy to write anything smarter than that.

P.S. By this standard, John at Dymaxion World MUST be a robot.