Talk:Just This Once

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A fact from Just This Once appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 26 February 2013 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the 1993 romance novel Just This Once was authored by a computer in collaboration with its programmer?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2013/February. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Just This Once.

Wikipedia

FAR TOO CREDULOUS

Please. Twenty years ago a programmer claimed he could get a computer to produce a Jacqueline Susan-like novel by feeding two of her novels into a database and applying his expert system and just a little editing by himself. It was good publicity for a book and various journalists went along with the gag, but if there were a word of truth to it, there would be a lot of computer novel-writing going on by now.

Would it be Original Research to at least point out that the whole thing is just based on one guy's unsupported word? Must we accept it as fact because a major newspaper pretended to? Mandrakos (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 04:06, 21 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it would be original research. Furthermore, it isn't just a major newspaper "pretending" to accept one guy at his word. This was widely reported at the time, and there have been academic articles written about it. If the project proved anything, it's that the task of creating a computer-generated novel isn't as simple as you make it out to be, requiring at least as much effort as actually writing the novel oneself.

Try looking at the sources. There are more out there than the article presents. Not all of them are online. An argument from personal incredulity isn't appropriate to present in the article as you suggest. ~Amatulić (talk) 04:14, 21 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It was a rhetorical question, Amatulic, of course I knew I couldn't merely express my own incredulity. I still rather believe that the L.A. Times reporter, et al., only pretended to buy the story they were peddling, however, as a good joke on a novelist they all despised. I have since dug up the New York Times article, far more detailed and skeptical, which makes clear that French wrote a quarter of the prose outright and another half of it in a constantly collaborative process with the machine: http://archive.is/UsoaM . In fairness to French, the account he gave to the Times writer sounds pretty credible, though possibly exaggerated -- it is the bad reporting of most of our sources here that turns it into a hoax. If I get really bored, I will use the Times reference to rectify the page. Mandrakos (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 04:28, 21 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]