Do Random Story Generators Work?

In a nutshell...

NO.

It really isn't possible to create a random story generator because there are too many moving parts to create such a thing and then have the plot and characters make sense.

I was contacted a few years ago by an idealistic young man who apparently thought it was possible to create a random story generator which would spew out stories based upon filling in a few blanks in a form.

He was forgetting that such a form would need to be capable of mixing and matching various descriptions of characters, of surroundings, and of any action sequences. It needed to be capable of using symbolism, foreshadowing, writing unique and compelling dialogue, etc.

So when I said "spew" out earlier what I really meant was vomit, because that is what it would be like to read such stories. It would be literary vomit.

Unreadable trash.

A complete waste of time.

Writing is too much of an art form to have an algorithm or a form that can simply be filled out and then the story is spewed out. It requires the human touch to create something artistic worth reading.

Even the most sophisticated AI (artificial intelligence) currently available is only capable of writing basic sentences, and even then when you converse with such AIs you can often trip them up and spot grammar and sentence problems with how they talk.

For example below is a brief conversation with Cleverbot. As you can tell Cleverbot managed to tell a very short story (too short to even be considered to be flash fiction)... But the story doesn't really make sense. He ended with "he took everyone." Huh?

But this is what you would expect to see from a robotic AI that is trying to make a story. There will be something wrong with it, even if the story is very short. Expecting an AI to make up a novel... Well, that just isn't going to work at all. Novels are too complicated.

A person could spend 50 years of their life trying to create a Random Story Generator with an AI that creates stories that makes sense, but they would never succeed.

It is like the Voight Kampff test scene in the film "Bladerunner". Eventually the AI will trip up and make a mistake, a mistake that a human would never make. A mistake that reveals the AI doesn't really understand how to tell a story and is just following its programming.