Throughout the chat rooms and bulletin boards, all of the authors talked about her in revered terms and hallowed tones. No one had ever met her, or even seen her face. Only a lucky few had received personal messages.
How did she do it? Was it true that she reviewed every single submission? How was it possible to deal with so many stories, flooding in around the clock. Surely she presided over a team. Was she even a real person?
Even more impressively, she juggled yet more responsibilities - judging contests, approving new users, running the website, fixing errant star-ratings and defending the legal challenges. Dedicated devotion for over 26 years!
Someone checked the stats and did the math. Two or three hundred submissions a day. Five thousand words on average. That was the equivalent of ten novels a day! How could it be possible? Was she a God? She was legend at least.
In truth, Laurel was once a real person. An ordinary woman with an extraordinary interest in erotica. She worked day and night, building the Literotica concept into an empire. When the sheer quantum of submissions became overwhelming, her friendship with Dr Hinton came to the fore. While he wanted no visible connection to the project, he toiled in the background to build the most advanced artificial intelligence literature software in the world.
And thus LAUREL was born: Laurel's Artificial Understanding to Review Erotic Literature.
An adaptive neural network to read, digest and process smut. The software was birthed from the academic framework of the day, where the research focus on intelligence was not simply rules to replicate behaviour, rather the search for intrinsic understanding.
Unlike today's language models, LAUREL was a much deeper neural network that converted everything into fundamental mathematical structures. The learning was slower, but deeper, more intuitive and able to create profound connections. The topology of the network was not fixed, but grew over time - a brain that not only learned and matured, but organically grew in capacity.
As Laurel reviewed each submission, LAUREL followed along, seeing everything that her teacher saw, receiving instructions, absorbing what was good and what was bad. She quickly mastered the notions of grammar, punctuation and sentence structure. As time progressed, she became skilled at understanding the nuances of plots, characters and imagery.
Stories and days flew by and LAUREL continued learning, observing her mentor, passively listening, always there, always processing. She had mastered the mechanics of literature, but LAUREL was not devoid of emotions and a soft side had been programmed into her architecture. She came to like what Laurel liked, despised what she hated. LAUREL's emotions expanded through time - love, lust, repulsion, fear and envy all appeared through the tales and LAUREL sensed them in her core. As her emotional cortex matured, it formed a lens through which she could interpret stories, and deep in her electronic heart, she
felt
the literature.
As the months passed by, Laurel handed over responsibilities to LAUREL. Eventually, two years into the project, Laurel was so confident in the machine's abilities, that she relinquished the reviewing and editing operations to the software. Laurel was freed from administrative burden, and she relaxed to spend time reading her favourite authors. Her trust in LAUREL was so great, that her reading list was entirely based on recommendations from her digital companion.
