https://www.wired.com/story/nanogenmo-ai-novels-gpt2/ > A few years ago this month, Portland, Oregon artist Darius Kazemi watched a flood of tweets from would-be novelists. November is National Novel Writing Month, a time when people hunker down to churn out 50,000 words in a span of weeks. To Kazemi, a computational artist whose preferred medium is the Twitter bot, the idea sounded mildly tortuous. “I was thinking I would never do that,” he says. “But if a computer could do it for me, I’d give it a shot.” > Kazemi sent off a tweet to that effect, and a community of like-minded artists quickly leapt into action. They set up a repo on Github, where people could post their projects and swap ideas and tools, and a few dozen people set to work writing code that would write text. Kazemi didn’t ordinarily produce work on the scale of a novel; he liked the pith of 140 characters. So he started there. He wrote a program that grabbed tweets fitting a certain template—some (often subtweets) posing questions, and plausible answers from elsewhere in the Twitterverse. It made for some interesting dialogue, but the weirdness didn’t satisfy. So, for good measure, he had the program grab entries from online dream diaries, and intersperse them between the conversations, as if the characters were slipping into a fugue state. He called it Teens Wander Around a House. First “novel” accomplished.