I was confused, unable to see the point. “Random generation is going to spit out a lot of junk ghost stories. You’re okay with that?”
“I am. Because the goal isn’t to create ghost stories. I’m just getting to the important part.” Kozakura’s eyes shined as she continued. “Let’s get back to what I was telling you before. First, there’s a linguistic space created from the shape of ghost stories. The goal of this program is to expand that conceptual space faster than the speed of human imagination.”
“Expand it...?”
“Ghost stories could be said to be an attempt at defining unknown conceptual spaces through the use of language. We use them to map out linguistic areas that human language has not yet reached. Each time a new ghost story is born, that unknown space becomes describable through human language.”
“Ohh... So that’s it. I’m starting to see where you’re going with this.”
There’s a small area that’s lit up inside the boundless darkness. We don’t know what’s outside that light. We humans perceive the area inside the light as “reality.” If Kozakura’s automatic ghost story generation program was an attempt at expanding the area that light covered, it made sense to me.
“I think it’s an interesting idea. But you’re only sampling past ghost stories, right? And yet, the reality is that new ghost stories are being created all the time. I feel like your automatically generated ghost stories are just going to be a bunch of ill-formed recreations.”
“How do you define a ‘new’ ghost story?”
“Let’s see... One that handles things that haven’t been spoken of before. Or one with developments that have yet to be seen. Then there’s what we call irrational ghost stories, where the story itself breaks down, and events don’t follow from one another. I’m not sure you can automatically generate that.”
“Not true. For one thing, things that haven’t been spoken of before can be introduced using dictionaries outside of the vocabulary collected from past ghost stories. For instance, let’s see...since they caught my eye, I bet there isn’t any ghost story featuring the sticks from ice pops, right?”
“There is.”
“So there is... Well, it doesn’t matter what it is, if I throw a list of random nouns at it, there will have to be some that haven’t been used before.”
“And how will you introduce new developments?”
“I think that most ghost stories have an abnormal event occur, which leads to another abnormal event, which leads to another...each adding more on to a preexisting story. How about it? Even in the example you gave us earlier, it felt to me like you started out with the overplayed trope of the old woman sitting on someone who has sleep paralysis, then went on adding more and more new developments. In other words, even if the stories have been told before, by digging into the developments that follow them, or expanding on the details, you can add novelty.”
“Fair enough... You might be able to claim that.”
There were actually a lot of ghost stories that started out making you feel like you were reading well-worn tropes...only for some unexpected detail to crop up and scare you. Stories involving youkai were a good example of that. My own experience encountering a mujina, for instance. If the story was just that I had encountered a person with no face on the street at night, that wouldn’t be that scary on its own. It’d just make me go, What is this, the Edo period? You’re just regurgitating Koizumi Yakumo. But the addition of the detail that the face was covered in pores rapidly made it give off a different impression. It could no longer be described in an idyllic manner like, “I met a nopperabou.” It was an account of a new experience of encountering something ridiculously creepy.
“What will you do about the irrational ghost stories?” Toriko asked in my place while I was lost in thought.
“I think there’s ways of handling them. I have two reasons for that. First, irrational sequences of events that don’t flow from one to the next are already one of the specialties of random generation. In fact, I suspect once I get the program running, most of its output will be irrational sequences of events that don’t stand up as stories. Even if the story goes the same way up until you wake up from sleep paralysis, if what you see there isn’t an old woman, but an ice pop stick...you already have an irrational ghost story.”
“Perhaps so,” I said. “By the way, if you replace that ice pop stick with a kettle, the story already exists.”
“Wasn’t the storyteller just dreaming?” Kozakura snarked.
“So, what’s your second reason?” I asked.
“If illogical ghost stories works as a category, that means there are ghost stories that make sense, a sort of rational ghost story.”
“Rational ghost stories... Isn’t that contradictory?” asked Toriko. “Aren’t ghost stories meant to be irrational?”
I took it on myself to address her question.
“No, not necessarily... There’s a whole lot of ghost stories where the cause is something like an ancestral curse, or the vengeance of a ghost, where you can see why the story went the way that it did. In that sense, talking about rational ghost stories may not be totally off base.”
“I wouldn’t know, but aren’t there actually more stories like that? If people had to go out of their way to come up with the category of irrational ghost stories.”
“I think you’re right.”
“Thought so. Which means, if we’re to seek irrationality not in the individual elements of the ghost story, but in the way developments take place, we just have to eliminate the sequential nature of the storytelling. To vastly oversimplify, if we shuffle the existing templates, deliberately creating a nonsequential story, we can guarantee its irrationality.”
“That all sounds logical,” I admitted begrudgingly. “But...”
“Let me clarify: I was simply answering your question of how to provide novelty to ghost stories that are being randomly generated. I don’t think there is any value in the stories that would be generated that way. I’m not looking to make ghost stories of the kind that you—or even humans in general—would want to read, Sorawo-chan. From the very beginning, quality was never part of the equation. The automatic generation is strictly a means of mapping the space of ghost stories as a linguistic form of expression and expanding it.”
“And what does mapping it do for you?”
“By learning the patterns and trends of the ghost stories that make up the other world, we can create a language model for the Otherside.”
“A language model... What’s that?”
“In the narrow sense, it’s a probabilistic model of a given language. If we’re going to be a bit more precise, it’s a program that learns the grammar and vocabulary of a given language, then predicts conversations. If it can predict what comes next in a conversation, that means it can provide an appropriate response when a human says something to it.”
“So, a program that can talk with humans?”
“Exactly. Haven’t you seen them talk about it in the news? Large language models.”
I knew they were a thing. But my knowledge of them only extended to some articles on AI I’d glanced at. Still, I was gradually figuring out the purpose of this program.
“Hold on, Kozakura-san...are you trying to create a program that can talk to the Otherside?”
Kozakura nodded. “You could say that’s the ultimate goal, yeah.”
“Are you trying to read the notes Satsuki left behind?” Toriko asked after a moment of silence. Her tone was tense, but Kozakura shook her head.
“Nah... That’s not what this is about. I think the letters in those notes, and the bizarre speech of people on the Otherside, are fundamentally different from the language this model handles.”
“It’s true that, since just reading them can cause harm, they must be different from normal language, but...where does the difference lie?” I wondered.
“You might call it a category error,” said Kozakura. “By my thinking, her notes aren’t even ‘language’ in the first place. That means that there’s no way to translate them into human words, and it’s likely impossible to create a simple model for them.”
“If they’re not language, then what are they?” I asked.
“Mere designs, or perhaps meaningless sequences of sound. You know how people sometimes try to imitate foreign languages, right? If you just imitate the form of a language you don’t know, your accent and pronunciation may sound right, but your output is going to be nonsense. It’s the same here.”
Seeing how uneasy Toriko looked, Kozakura turned and gave her a strained smile. “Don’t worry. I wouldn’t touch those notes even if they begged me to.”
There was a pause before Toriko said, “Okay.”
“Hold on. What happened to those notes anyway? Didn’t they disappear?”
“They’re still around,” I answered. “We brought them back from the funeral.”