Just This Once

Creation

Scott French scanned and analyzed portions of two Jacqueline Susann books, Valley of the Dolls and Once Is Not Enough, to identify components of her writing style. The analysis extracted several hundred components, including frequency and type of sexual acts and sentence structure. French created several thousand rules to govern tone, plotting, scenes, and characters. The text generated by the computer Hal was intended to mimic Susann's style, though the output required significant editing. French credited Hal with almost 100% of the plot and 100% of the theme and style. He estimated that he wrote 10% of the prose, Hal wrote about 25%, and the remaining two-thirds was a collaboration. A typical scene involved Hal asking questions—such as about the cattiness factor in a meeting between two female characters—and French answering with a range of 1 to 10; the computer then generated a few sentences, which French edited slightly, repeating the process until the scene was complete.

Legal issues

Jacqueline Susann's publisher had concerns about whether Just This Once was legal, but Scott French argued that an author's thought process couldn't be copyrighted. Susann's estate reportedly threatened legal action, though the two sides settled privately, agreeing to share profits under confidential terms. The case sparked debate among legal experts about how copyright law should handle computer-generated works created by analyzing existing copyrighted material, and whether such works amount to infringement. At the time, commentators noted that existing copyright laws were not designed to address creative works produced by computers.

Reception

The novel's publisher, Steven Shragis of Carol Group, acknowledged it wasn't a great literary work but insisted it matched anything else in the genre and surpassed many. Early praise came from novelist Thomas Gifford in USA Today, who compared it to Jackie Collins's American Star and advised fans of that style to choose the computer-written version instead. The Dead Jackie Susann Quarterly suggested the author would have approved, citing the book's abundance of money, sleaze, disease, death, oral sex, tragedy, and a good girl gone bad.

Other reactions were more divided. Publishers Weekly noted that while Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins can seem formulaic, this debut about sin and success in Las Vegas exceeds them all, which is partly the point—the only real novelty is the computer authorship, not the plot. Library Journal described the project as an eight-year, $50,000 scheme using artificial intelligence to create a trashy novel in the style of Susann. It called the shallow, beautiful characters flat and randomly inserted into a formulaic plot, labeling the result a sexy but boring morality tale. The review suggested computer enthusiasts might find the use of Expert Systems interesting, but advised others to read Susann instead. Kirkus Reviews framed the situation as author French acting as a midwife rather than a writer, having programmed his computer to mimic Susann's style. It noted the machine nearly captured her turgid yet easy-reading prose and reliable mix of sex, glitz, drugs, and despair. However, it questioned whether the computer would fare as well on talk shows as Susann did, and remarked that computer enthusiasts have long warned about the principle of garbage in, garbage out.