2It makes things

AI writes a story for you

Chapter 1 was pictures. This time it's a story.

Pick whose story it is, and how it starts.

The story appears one line at a time. No person wrote it.

Press Let AI write a story once more. Same cards, different story.

AI doesn't fetch a story from somewhere. It joins sentences it has read into a new one.

This machine read 600 stories. So what it writes looks like them.

A little deeper

For grown-ups, and for children who want more.

The story is stitched by a Markov chain, invented by the Russian mathematician Markov in the early 1900s — older than computers.

It works by counting. Read a pile of stories, tally which sentence followed which, and you have a table. Then draw from that table by probability. What comes out resembles what went in without repeating it.

Our first version worked word by word and we threw it away: it reproduced original sentences word-for-word, 100% of the time. With only 600 stories, most words had exactly one possible successor. Switching to whole sentences and widening the openings to 7,680 combinations brought the overlap down to 10.9%.

Today's chatbots share this root. The difference is that a neural network learns the relationship instead of a counted table holding it.

Try together — press three times from the same opening and lay the three stories side by side. Have the child mark where they match and where they split. "The machine is choosing every time" stops being a claim and becomes something visible.