Researcher Trying to Crack Creative Process : Melodrama Writers Beware--It’s a New UNIVERSE

As if television isn’t filled with enough melodrama, a computer program named UNIVERSE is writing simple soap operas for a Columbia University researcher who wants to understand human creativity.

“It’s now at the point where it can write a few simple plot outlines,” said Michael Lebowitz, an associate professor of computer science who discussed the project during the Cognitive Science Society’s annual meeting at the University of California, Irvine.

“I can imagine someday having a computer create a script for ‘Days of Our Lives,’ ” the New York researcher said. Computers eventually might produce serious works of literature, if programmers can learn how real authors do it.

Lebowitz works in a field known as artificial intelligence, the science of writing computer programs that do “smart” things, such as making medical diagnoses or understanding language. To do that, programmers first must figure out, step by step, how people perform such tasks.

Lebowitz is trying to break the creative process of writing a soap opera into a set of standard formulas or plot fragments, such as the unhappy marriage, and rules used to assemble such fragments into interesting stories. One rule is that melodrama characters never live happily ever after.

If the computer writes a nonsensical story by following the rules to assemble plot fragments, Lebowitz said, it means his ideas of how human authors write needs improvement.

“It gives you insight into human creativity, which in artificial intelligence is one of the things we understand least,” he said Friday. “This form of creativity (writing soap operas) is something we perhaps can get a handle on, simpler than trying to figure out how (James) Joyce wrote ‘Ulysses.’ ”

By increasing UNIVERSE’s now-limited plot options and ground rules, “it will be able to create more and more complicated stories,” Lebowitz said.

“This is not unlike what authors of a melodrama would tend to do,” he said. “They have a lot of abstract (plot) formulas, and they figure how those interact with the characters and use that to churn out stories.”

Lebowitz doubts that computers will replace TV soap opera writers, but he envisions “a computer-controlled soap opera that you’re a part of.”

“It would probably be on a computer with graphics or video discs,” he said. “The basic idea is that you would be one of the characters. The computer would control the other characters, and you would tell it what to do with your character.”

He also sees practical benefits.

“If we want to teach reading or writing, you can have a computer program that writes stories to help teach morals or reading,” he said.