Artificial imagination is

not a "thing". It does not exist. It cannot exist.

There has been more than one post about a magazine changing their publication policy. In order to save money they will no longer pay authors for short stories. Instead they will use "artificial intelligence" to write the stories and readers will be told they come from "the fiction team". 

Yes, it is possible to ask "AI" to write something but what will it produce? There is an enormous amount of material out there AI can draw on. Does this mean AI can produce something genuinely creative? Will it be the sort of writing people will want to read?

As mere kittens my brother I went through quite a lot of Enid Blyton and Biggles and other "series". We mostly borrowed them from friends because our parents were not keen on them. We read them because we read anything we could get. Did we enjoy them? Yes, of course - in an surfeit of sugar type of way. We grew into more serious writing very quickly. The Senior Cat made sure we could borrow from the Children's Library and then the children's section of the Country Lending Service. I will be forever grateful that he knew how important reading was and how much it meant to us.

I looked at a couple of Enid Blyton books recently. I was waiting for a friend whose daughter is young enough to be "going through that phase". Both the books I looked at did not appeal at all. The characters were flat. The action non-existent or ridiculous.  They might well have appealed to me as a child who was desperate to read but they no longer interested me. The same is probably true of many adults now. 

I suspect the stories produced by AI will be much the same as those written by Enid Blyton.  They will be written to a formula. They will be predictable. There will be variations on the "beautiful" and the "handsome" but they will still end "happily ever after".  

This is not good writing. It is not writing at all. It will not flow and take the reader along with it. I do not see how AI can ever achieve those little things which allow us to see the world in new ways.  All AI is really doing is drawing on what is already there. It cannot imagine. It may seem as if it can but it cannot. 

I know I am not explaining this well but I cannot help hoping AI cannot "imagine" my cathedral cats. If AI can do that then there is nothing left for us to create...and I think we were born with the capacity to create.