> Agreed about the meaningful choices and dynamically generated reactions from NPC, but general AI is not needed for this in my opinion.

Maybe, but it would be an impressive demonstration of AI that would be very different to what has shown for Go, Chess and StarCraft.

I think a compelling AI written short story for example would be leagues ahead of what is required to write a convincing chatbot e.g. you need an overarching plot, subplots, multiple characters interacting in the world, having to track characters beliefs and knowledge, tracking what the reader must be thinking/feeling.

It would likely rely a lot on understanding real-world and culture knowledge though - Go and StarCraft are much cleaner in comparison.

> A percentage of vocal players will complain no matter what.

Yep, but I can't think of a single game that has a plot that meaningfully adapts to how the player plays. Either there's many endings but the path to get to each is short, or all the choices converge quickly back into the same path.

Again, please correct me if I'm wrong but I've look quite hard for examples of innovation in the above recently and haven't found much. You can find examples of papers on e.g. automated story generation or game quest generation on Google Scholar from the last 10 years but the examples I found weren't that compelling.

AI-generated "true" fiction seems like scifi to me.

Of course an hypothetical "Turing Test" of fiction-writing might be able to fool some people, and in an age where Netflix has been accused of producing content "by algorithm" this seems increasingly possible, but...

... what is "true" or "good" fiction is up for debate. In fact, it's a debate that can never be solved, because there is no right answer except what it feels to you, your friends and authors you respect.

But that said, I seriously doubt it would fool me, and I think it won't be within reach of an AI any time soon, or ever, not without creating an artificial human being from scratch. And maybe not even then, because how many real people can write compelling fiction anyway? :)

> Of course an hypothetical "Turing Test" of fiction-writing might be able to fool some people, and in an age where Netflix has been accused of producing content "by algorithm" this seems increasingly possible, but...

So it feels like you should be able to procedurally generate stories at least something by combining common story arches, templates, character archetypes etc. without too much effort but I've yet to find any compelling examples of this anywhere. When you look into the problem more, you realise it's a lot harder than it seems.

We've seen lots of examples of chat bots that are said to pass the Turing Test but really aren't that intelligent at all so a "Turing Test of fiction writing" as you put sounds like a super interesting next step to me.