Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
‘New Brothers Grimm’ fairy tale written by AI algorithm
ONCE upon a time, two German brothers brought us the classic fairy tales of Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. Now some 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 and is also the first new Brothers Grimm fairy tale.
The Princess And The Fox is the product of a predictive text algorithm that was fed the stories of the Brothers Grimm, 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 miller’s son to rescue the beautiful princess from the fate of having to marry a dreadful 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 new tale. “We’re doing for the Brothers Grimm what Jurassic Park did for dinosaurs. We’re bringing them back from the dead, with modern science .