The story begins with a short, pithy sentence: "It was nine seventeen in the morning, and the house was heavy." In clipped yet lyrical prose, the novel goes on to narrate an actual road trip from New York to New Orleans taken by six friends in 2017. The narrator of the novel is not one of the friends, however. It's the car itself: an artificial intelligence network on wheels that was equipped with a camera, a GPS, and a microphone. The various gadgets fed information into a laptop running AI software; then a printer spat out sentences-sometimes coherent, sometimes poetic-as the group glided south down the highway. This experiment in novel writing using AI, led by artist and technologist Ross Goodwin, prompted people to consider the crucial role language plays in creating culture. Was the resultant novel, 1 the Road, a free-prose manuscript modeled after Jack Kerouac's famous On The Road, a genuine piece of art? Or was it merely a high-tech version of fridge magnet poetry? "Who's writing the poetry?" asked Goodwin's colleague Christiana Caro from Google Research. "I really don't know how to answer that question."
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