【】

Google is using romance novels to teach its artificial intelligence (AI) system to better understand how people communicate.

Researchers at Google Brain, the company's AI-focused deep learning project, presented a paper earlier this month that detailed techniques they used to teach its AI to write fiction -- and the results were unexpectedly haunting.

SEE ALSO:Japanese team helps A.I. program pass first round of novel writing contest

The paper, first reported by Quartz, details Google's method, which involved using thousands of romance novels and other works of fiction to "train" the AI. The company then fed the model two sentences to serve as a starting point and endpoint and tasked it with generating transition sentences in between.

While some of the results were a bit nonsensical, others were surprisingly haunting (the researchers concede the source material is "often rather dramatic.") 

Mashable Light SpeedWant more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories?Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter.By signing up you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.Thanks for signing up!

You can read a few of the AI-generated excerpts below. The bolded sentences represent lines fed to the model by Google's researchers.

this was the only way.
it was the only way.
it was her turn to blink. 
it was hard to tell. 
it was time to move on.
he had to do it again. 
they all looked at each other.
they all turned to look back.
they both turned to face him.
they both turned and walked away. 

there is no one else in the world. 
there is no one else in sight.
they were the only ones who mattered.
they were the only ones left.
he had to be with me.
she had to be with him.
i had to do this.
i wanted to kill him. 
i started to cry. 
i turned to him.

it made me want to cry. 
no one had seen him since. 
it made me feel uneasy.
no one had seen him. 
the thought made me smile.
the pain was unbearable.
the crowd was silent.
the man called out.
the old man said.
the man asked.

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

TopicsArtificial IntelligenceGoogle