Goalposts

Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?

2016 MarchTillE

About whether AI will write popular books or make whole animated films, after AlphaGo's win.

Music is a much easier problem (tight structure, lots of existing data to quickly analyze), and the animation bit is already being pretty thoroughly explored by procedural generation in games. You'd still need a "director" to pick shots, but most of the other pieces are nearly in place. We have algorithms that can create new environments, and design and animate new characters.

But generating a coherent narrative, and good writing to "implement" that narrative. These are huge problems which - as far as I'm aware - would require major breakthroughs to achieve. Machine translation is still utter garbage, and that's fairly straightforward work. We're nowhere near an AI which actually understands language.

An AI writes a book with a coherent narrative and good writing.

Has this happened?

Yes 34 (26%)Not sure 24 (18%)No 72 (55%)

Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.