Melanie Subaya is 28 years old. She lives in New York and she's an artificial intelligence researcher.

As a kid, were you always interested in computers?

I actually

I really loved reading and writing and that's actually how I got into natural language

processing eventually and that then kind of became my interest in

loving computer science.

And when Melanie was in college in 2016, she

tried to bring together her two interests, computer science and literature. Her idea was to build an AI model that could write short stories,

which at the time was a tall order.

How good of a writer was AI back then?

Terrible, absolutely terrible.

Could it string a sentence together?

It could.

It was hard to get beyond a sentence and definitely beyond a couple sentences was very hard.

For her senior thesis, Melanie built what's called a language model.

She fed a computer around 100,000 examples of short stories, really short ones, just five sentences long.

And then she asked the model to write its own story. She would give it the first line and the AI would fill in the rest.

For some reason the model loved to end the story with somebody getting very nervous and going to buy a car.

And so... with somebody getting very nervous and going to buy a car and so I'm sorry is that how where did it learn that for some reason that was what it landed on So an example is Tyrone was working at his job in a local restaurant. He was very nervous about his first job. He was very nervous about the job. He was very nervous about it. He went to the store to quite a few examples. Can we hear another one?

Yeah. Frank had surprised the whole family when he came home that day.

When he got home, he was able to get a new car. He was very

happy to be able to get his own. He was very happy with his new job. He was very

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