Automation
As a wanna-be writer, I am often exposed to books and websites and so on that purport to have the secret to writing best-selling books. One almost gets the impression that if one could only eliminate the passive, ensure that the main character works their way through a checklist of actions in the first chapter, never confuses “that” and “which”, and avoid the use of “they” as a singular indefinite pronoun, success would automatically follow. I’ve always been skeptical of writing good fiction through rules, but now comes this. If a computer can recognize a double-entendre, surely a fully-automated best-seller writing program is not far behind. Hard times indeed.
[…] don’t think this XKCD was actually referring to the same thing I was on my previous post on automation, but who […]
» Automation Followup The Blue Candle Society said this on May 10, 2011 at 9:14 pm