A ‘Grimm’ tale with a happy ending, 200 years on

ONCE upon a time, two German brothers brought us the classic fairy tales of Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. Now, 200 years later comes the happy ending… a new tale called The Princess and the Fox.

It promises to be the first bedtime story generated by artificial intelligence. The Princess and the Fox is the product of a predictive text algorithm that was fed the stories of the brothers, the famed compilers of children’s folktales, and trained to mimic their style.

It’s a tale of a king, a magical golden horse, a forlorn princess and a poor miller’s son. A talking fox helps the son to rescue the beautiful princess from the fate of having to marry a prince she does not love.

“Once upon a time,” starts the story, which runs to slightly over 1 500 words, “there was a golden horse with a golden saddle and a beautiful purple flower in its hair. The horse would carry the flower to the village where the princess danced for joy at the thought of looking so beautiful and good.”

“You might call it a form of literary cloning,” says Michael Acton Smith, co-founder of Calm, the meditation and sleep app that commissioned the tale. “We’re bringing (the Brothers Grimm) back from the dead with modern science, except, of course, with a happy ending.”

“We’re calling it The Lost Grimm Fairy Tale,” says Alex Tew, cofounder of Calm. “It’s something old and new, familiar but fresh. It’s storytelling – but not as we know it.”

While the brothers used quill and ink, this is a collaboration between machines and humans – a team at Calm and Botnik, a group of writers, artists and programmers who use machine intelligence to create new forms of writing.

Botnik trained its predictive text programme, known as Voicebox, on the collected stories. The programme works in a similar way to the predictive text on your phone but instead suggests words and phrases based on the writing of the particular authors.

“The human writers took the phrases and sentences suggested by the predictive text programme and began to assemble them into the rough shape of a story,” says Jamie Brew, chief executive of Botnik.

“We filled in the gaps, either using further algorithmic suggestions from the keyboard or simply by writing details that struck us as natural completions of the scene.”

So, are literary robots the future? And what comes next? A new AI Shakespeare play or Dickens novel? “Anything now seems possible,” says Tew.