Mechanical Intervention (short story collection)

2024: Storybook Issue

In September 2024, the first Russia in a collection of stories written by a neural network YandexGPT in collaboration with modern Russian writers was published. The collection, entitled "Mechanical Intervention," includes 15 stories, each created with the participation of artificial intelligence. The publishing house Alpina Publisher presented the book in the museum "," Yandex where an official presentation was organized.

According to Kommersant, sixteen famous Russian authors worked on the creation of the collection, who received complete creative freedom in writing works. The YandexGPT neural network was integrated into the process of writing stories, and its role ranged from assistant to full-fledged co-author, which gave the works a variety in style and theme. Some writers used AI as a tool to generate plots, while others incorporated it into character roles, allowing experimentation with various creative techniques.

source = Alpina Publisher

One of the project participants, writer Dmitry Zakharov, shared his experience of interacting with a neural network. According to him, YandexGPT helped generate storylines, and although it did not use all the proposed ideas, some of them turned out to be very useful for developing the text. The writer Shamil Idiatullin also noted that, despite attempts to force AI to write something in the style of famous authors, such as Stephen King or Vladimir Sorokin, the result was unexpected - the neural network proposed original and independent phrases, two of which were included in his story.

According to the publication, the collection includes various genres, from fiction to psychological drama. For example, author Yana Wagner instructed neural networks to write summaries of the climate catastrophe in her story "30-70," where heroes face extreme weather conditions. At the same time, Evgenia Nekrasova used a neural network to create conspiracies uttered by the heroine of her story - a homeowner from The Witch's Wedding^[1]

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