About whether AI will write popular books or make whole animated films, after AlphaGo's win.
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.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether AI will write popular books or make whole animated films, after AlphaGo's win.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
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.