> Simpler question: with a sufficiently-smart story generator, could you enjoy it if you knew it was procedurally generated? I feel that I couldn't.

I feel like this might commit you to having some amount of conflict with "death of the author"?

If one cares that the writing was written by a person, and not just transcribed by a person, but composed by a person, it seems to me like one probably cares that the writing was done with an intent.

I don't see a reason that one would care about whether the writing was made with an intent, in a way that plays a role in whether one enjoys it, but not care at all about what that intent was.

So, I would expect that anyone who couldn't, or at least most people who couldn't, enjoy a work of fiction if they knew it was procedurally generated, probably would care about the intent of the author in writing what they are reading.

I also generally care about that, but I think I sometimes enjoy procedurally generated works, though this might be largely due to my knowing about the intent behind the writing of the code that produced the procedurally generated content, which includes substantial bits of literal text to include in the output, so..

What if it was ML trained on all the novels in Project Gutenberg? I would think the general style of writing could be convincing, but I wonder about things like overall plot, character development, and pacing. At least for a human author, those require a certain degree of planning, it would be interesting to see if AI could just 'let them happen' or if it'd be the literary equivalent of a shaggy dog joke.

>You can easily fool people into thinking they're talking with a person even though they're talking with a machine.

Citation needed. After 5 minutes of chatting with a robot, you conclude it's either an insane clown or a robot.

I fooled enough people with my half-assed IRC bot that did a bit of fuzzy pattern-matching for natural language queries.

It's harder to fool someone in an actual, focused 1:1 conversation, but it's easy to do in brief interactions when people don't suspect the other party may be a bot.

See also: automated news stories, autogeneration of e-mails, etc.