You mention markov chains and as a student of English literature I'd like to point out what I believe to be the main in-humanness in generated prose that makes it stray from "real" prose.
Some have mentioned pointless sentences, but I don't think that is such an issue for modern literature. Modern prose mostly has to do with what words come after each other on a small scale, such as a single phrase, or the associativity between words and between sentences, and at any given moment most words are only used for a few sentences, then replaced by other words.
The main problem is therefore large-scale structure, chapter to chapter. For one, the recurrence of a theme throughout several volumes of work is crucial to creating its emotional value and cohesiveness. None of which appears in Markov Chains.
And secondly, possibly the greatest shortfall of Markov Chains (ignoring performance) is in plot. They're just not very imaginative. Prose, let's say later than ancient epics, has interesting, recursive plot devices. Plot is what gives emotional power to sentences, and most markov chains are painfully incapable of creating any.
That being said, I don't think this problem is inherent to the problem of writing prose using Markov Chains. Right now it sounds like what you'd get with a crowd-sourced writing prompt, but Markov Chains can go beyond this - and literary criticism is what it will take to bring Markov Chains up to the standard of popular writers like Stephen King.
It's pretty clear that in the near future, we will laugh at the idea of reading something that someone hand-typed from their own thoughts, instead of simply reading the output of one-dimensional random walk. I hope if I have grandchildren who are as interested in modern literature as I am, their degree will be a bachelor of science, with the only work they have to do being to quantify and remove any remaining guesswork from the science of computer-generated writing. Even today, it is hard to understand why anyone still reads writing written by someone. It's as quaint as a telegram.
The main path going forward in improving Markov chains is expanding the individual "unit" that are selected by these chains. Current Markov chains only randomly select words to string together into semi-coherent thoughts, but what if they instead randomly select paragraphs, or even entire chapters? This will promote large-scale structure within the book, and ensure the plot will always be varied and engaging.
I hope that your grandchildren's Bachelor of Science would train them in curating brilliant works of art that can then be feed into the Markov chain and perform the one-dimensional random walk.
I was actually making fun of this way of producing "art" (such as music.) Obviously since the algorithm has no human 'state of mind' or emotion, it cannot include any in the art whatsoever. My comment was completely satirical.
My comment was satirical too actually. The whole idea of thinking computers have created something "new and original" just by shoving together bits and pieces of human-produced works of art seems somewhat ridiculous. It's not entirely ridiculous, as the computer did do some manual labor of piecing together the words, but ultimately, you are relying on a corpus of pre-existing work and then reassembling it together. Any emotion (or indeed, most of anything good) comes from the corpus, not from the bot analyzing and imitating the corpus.
Some have mentioned pointless sentences, but I don't think that is such an issue for modern literature. Modern prose mostly has to do with what words come after each other on a small scale, such as a single phrase, or the associativity between words and between sentences, and at any given moment most words are only used for a few sentences, then replaced by other words.
The main problem is therefore large-scale structure, chapter to chapter. For one, the recurrence of a theme throughout several volumes of work is crucial to creating its emotional value and cohesiveness. None of which appears in Markov Chains.
And secondly, possibly the greatest shortfall of Markov Chains (ignoring performance) is in plot. They're just not very imaginative. Prose, let's say later than ancient epics, has interesting, recursive plot devices. Plot is what gives emotional power to sentences, and most markov chains are painfully incapable of creating any.
That being said, I don't think this problem is inherent to the problem of writing prose using Markov Chains. Right now it sounds like what you'd get with a crowd-sourced writing prompt, but Markov Chains can go beyond this - and literary criticism is what it will take to bring Markov Chains up to the standard of popular writers like Stephen King.
It's pretty clear that in the near future, we will laugh at the idea of reading something that someone hand-typed from their own thoughts, instead of simply reading the output of one-dimensional random walk. I hope if I have grandchildren who are as interested in modern literature as I am, their degree will be a bachelor of science, with the only work they have to do being to quantify and remove any remaining guesswork from the science of computer-generated writing. Even today, it is hard to understand why anyone still reads writing written by someone. It's as quaint as a telegram.