In the field of artificial intelligence (AI) the automated generation of stories has been a subject of research for over fifty years. The underlying concept of "story" in story generation research is functional and does not imply any aesthetic notion. This is important because the evaluation of generated stories does not necessarily use the criterion of a readable and appealing text. Research on storytelling systems (computational systems capable of telling a story) initially arose as a part of the general trend in AI to build computational solutions that could undertake tasks that are easy for humans and difficult for machines. Some such efforts, such as computer vision and speech processing, have achieved success and given rise to commercial applications, whereas others, such as natural language understanding and story generation, still remain at the exploratory research stage.
(Source: Author's introduction)