What story is this?

[H. Bergeron]

I am looking for some help tracking down a short story I read. I read it last year, but I have been checking out SF short-story compilations from the school's (sizable) library endlessly, so I have no idea when it was from.
 
The story begins with a snowy day, people going to this presentation (dissertation defense?) where the student had created a program designed to write prose at the same level of skill as a real human being. There are various characters present - faculty members, some of the science faculty and some of the arts faculty. There is a drunken artist-in-residence poet. They need a short 'seed phrase' of some sort to give the program a central idea to write the story about, so they use a bit from a physics textbook about two mirrors, facing each other, about how the reflection each time gets darker and further away.

The computer writes a story that's basically the same as the story up until that point, except the characters are more blunt and more dirty. They go through the same thing, three or four more times, and each time the story is darker, shorter, blunter, and the characters are more direct. The very last story is something really short, just "Hope." Then it has "THE END" five times in a row (one for each story).


...Halp? 

[wintermute]

Not the story you're asking for, but it reminds me of an Asimov story where an author uses a cybernetic story-writing monkey to convince his editor not to re-write his story.

Ah, here we are: The Monkey's Finger.

[Listener]

If you figure it out, post a link. It sounds cool.

[Graham]

Silicon Muse by Hilbert Schenck.

Good story, I read it in the Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories ed. Tom Shippey.

[H. Bergeron]

Silicon Muse by Hilbert Schenck.

Good story, I read it in the Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories ed. Tom Shippey.

Son of a gun, you're right.  I looked it up in the library catalog, and it looks like I must have read it at my other school, last year, which puts it out of reach now.  Damn.

Thanks!