Recently, online writers with low starting point and high social status have been "exploded" with a hidden rule: novels don’t need to be written, but can be generated directly with software?
This rumor is like the explosion of a bunch of underground "net text generators" by a thunder. xx is a self-assistant, xx author, xx writer, xx generator … as small as two or three words of names to hundreds of words, from the mysterious killing of enmity to the unspeakable romance, readers find that all these softwares can "write".



It’s still the original formula, or the familiar taste. This makes readers begin to wonder whether the novels they read were written by people or generated by software. Is it difficult to write a net text now to copy and paste it?
For this reason, The Paper contacted Xie Jian, the founder of Xuanpai.com, who is famous for its large number of generators, and the author of early generators. He said that the so-called "online novel generator" does not exist, and it is impossible to automatically generate novels with the current technical software.
The generator is just a font.
"Word generators have actually existed for a long time, such as Feng Shui naming websites," Xie Jian said, and the public has overreacted to the so-called "net text generators".
In 2011, Xie Jian was still a programmer. In this year, he unintentionally triggered two "big switches". The first one was that he knew about Bitcoin and entered the business the following year. In two years, his net worth exceeded 10 million; The second switch was in the urban hacker novel he wrote at that time. In order to facilitate the long creation, he wrote himself a webpage plug-in to automatically generate the names of characters. Unexpectedly, the original private tool was quickly spread by friends and became the earliest online writing tool. Even now, it still has more than 5,000 daily visits.
Inadvertent splash made Xie Jian aware of the needs of online writers. Within a few years, he successively produced more than ten generators such as place names, titles, appearances and moves. Xie Jian introduced that the so-called "generator" is actually an optimized font, which can be combined to generate phrases, sentences and paragraphs according to certain rules.
The main principle of the generator is the custom combination of keywords, and the keywords are replaced by constructing some regular paradigms. For example, the general formula of ancient clothing description is: color+technology+pattern+material+style, which consists of five parts. Based on this formula, it is generated: azurite elastic ink vine pattern brocade sleeve coat.
By applying the same logic to fantasy, Xianxia and magic words, we can make a series of generators, such as the generator of skill cheats, the generator of move names, the generator of magic weapons, the generator of natural talents, the generator of fairy birds and animals, and the generator of panacea.
More complicated, such as generating a paragraph describing the appearance of an ancient woman, is the application of a large number of words of the same type in a fixed formula, such as the formula: "She has a {vacancy word}, wears a {vacancy word}, mops the floor {vacancy word}, and wears a {vacancy word}", which can give birth to "She has a pink duck-egg face and wears a {vacancy word}" "She has a white baby’s face, wearing a printed vase pattern, a narrow sleeve armor with ten brocade necklines, a pale blue embroidered yuet skirt, and a dark-patterned Bixia Luo Danluo yarn with a light gold background." And other versions.

The biggest difficulty in making generator lies in the establishment of font. There are many specific methods, some of which are to look up classical books and choose the words you need from books such as Daozang and Yijing. Once, an author directly took eleven words from Chapter 39 of Laozi’s Tao Te Ching to create the name of martial arts cheats.
Xie Jian said that the generator he made can’t complete the rumored function of automatically generating net texts. He took the title generator as an example to illustrate the limitations of the generator. "The production process needs to collect a large number of similar titles and train the program according to the titles, but the most you get is typed titles, and nouns can be generated. This is the data generated according to similarity. However, the current generator lacks the ability of deep learning in the storyline. Simply put, it can’t make up stories. "
Xie Jian defined the generator as an "auxiliary tool" for writing, which can only give fragments of the novel samples, but can’t create the story independently. He said that he was "too lazy" to the author who directly used the generated paragraphs (especially female frequency) in the market, turned "writing a book" into "editing a book" and even caused plagiarism disputes.
The net text may be the first kind of novels occupied by AI.
The generator written by Xie Jian has actually become famous for a long time. In 2012, he was very beautiful as a programmer. In that year, he attracted a lot of media attention with his own software. But does technology improve productivity or cover creativity? Is it "the wind is coming" or "the wolf is coming" No one can say for sure, so it is generally very vigilant.
"In 2012, a media published a news article, saying that there was a kind of software that could generate novels by selecting keywords, and there was a picture called’ Description Generator of Ancient Women’s Appearance through Novels’. My first reaction was that someone copied my software idea. A closer look at this software made me realize that this interface was drawn with tools. "Xie Jian guessed that it might be that the reporter saw the content of their website but felt that the web version was not newsworthy enough, so he asked someone to DIY such an interface.
"Some people may think that online writing software has tarnished the reputation of online writers, and they will think that most online texts are generated, and then they think that online texts are worthless." This is the biggest question that Xie Jian encountered.
"I’ve heard of people spelling paragraphs generated by generators into texts before, and some really make a living from them, but now this set is not popular, and readers can clearly distinguish that this writing is water injection." In his view, the requirements of readers just reduce the possibility of the author writing with the generator.
Then why do people think that the "online novel generator" exists? Perhaps it is the news that in recent years, poems have been written with software and press releases have been written with robots, which has invisibly increased people’s imagination of artificial intelligence. How far is artificial intelligence from the novel after vague poems and formulaic press releases?
"There are routines and patterns in the net text. If it is split into links with a strong sense of logic, it can be made by software in theory." Xie Jian thinks that net writing may even become the first base for artificial intelligence to capture novel creation.
As a science and engineering man, Xie Jian made no secret of his optimism about the prospect of artificial intelligence in liberal arts. "What should be developed should be developed, and what can be achieved will inevitably be realized." He believes that the development of technology will further improve human productivity. With the continuous improvement of artificial intelligence technology, it will certainly bring great efficiency improvement in some very logical fields, and it is not impossible to partially replace human beings in the creative field. As long as it is carefully designed by software writers, AI can be created whether it is non-fiction literature or fiction literature.
Last year, in Japan, a novel, which was composed of the hero and heroine and the synopsis of the story, and artificial intelligence was responsible for the combination of words, was shortlisted for the "hoshi shinichi Prize for Literature" and successfully passed the preliminary examination.
The reporter asked Xie Jian, who also uses software to generate texts, why is it popular to write poems with software, but controversial to write online texts with software?
He analyzed that readers are not disgusted with writing with software, but are disgusted with plagiarism. "Some generation tools directly archive existing novels, search directly when necessary, and then copy and paste them." This has caused many readers to think that writing with software is copying other people’s texts.

Team writing is more advantageous.
Although the "online novel generator" does not exist, in fact, online texts written by software did appear in China.
For example, as early as 10 years ago, there was a book called "Flash Students of the Universe Giant School", and the introduction was enough to catch the eye: "There are 111 books, which are divided into 1111 volumes. According to the pure text (txt format), the total number of words in this book exceeds 340 trillion. If it is calculated in Chinese, the total number of words should not be less than 170 million." And such a number of words is developed by VB, which takes only more than 30 hours to generate.
However, what is generated in this way is readable? There are a lot of repetitive words and logical errors in the article, such as non-curiosity, which is really not a good literary work.

The technology is not promising. Xie Jian insists that it is more realistic to develop tools to improve writing efficiency than to develop software to write articles. He is developing a software that can split a novel into outlines, characters, details and other links, and assign them to team members for simultaneous creation, which is equivalent to the model of animation and screenwriter team.
Economically speaking, the profit generated by a novel can feed a team, and if there is AI cooperation, it can stably produce more than 10,000 words in three hours.
In terms of content, online novels don’t require the accuracy of the author’s writing style and words, but value stories, good reading experience and imagination space. Xie Jian believes that this provides the possibility for teamwork-developing novels as software engineering, and implementing standardized process production after determining the content. For this reason, he analyzed some popular books, such as "Breaking the Sky" and "Ghost Blowing Lights", and extracted the bridge routines with the greatest commercial value as writing reference.
So is this kind of teamwork unfair to other writers who work alone? Xie Jian told reporters that "team writing" is the hidden rule in the circle.
"Nearly half of the Great God writers have professional creative teams, which are semi-public in the industry, which is the so-called Great God Studio. The process is that the Great God specifies the outline of the novel, and then the following people are responsible for the specific writing, and the word habits keep the style uniform. " In Xie Jian’s view, online novels are different from traditional serious literature, and readers of online texts are mainly used to pass the time. Even if gunmen write for them in the studio, as long as the creative style is unified, readers will still buy it.
At present, Xie Jian’s three-person creative team is attacking urban and real-life online texts at a speed of more than 6,000 words per day. The "team writing" software he developed can be put into test within this year, and "making works that are not popular" is his initial goal.
Whether software writing or team writing is a market exploration under the legal framework, readers don’t have to make predictions because of the author’s identity. Besides, although the hidden rules of the industry emerge one after another, at least your personal experience is credible.