After hearing the buzz about the abilities different chat bots to complete human tasks e.g. passing the bar exam, MCAT, GRE, or write college essays, I decided to ask one if it would write one of my books.
For my first go, I gave Microsoft’s chatbot the basic set up of my novel City on a Hill, feeding it not much more than the books teaser. Then I asked it to write me a story in the style of William Gibson.
While the chatbot kept cutting itself off about ten paragraphs into the story to tell me that such a task was too complicated for it, I was nonetheless impressed and also horrified at how eerily good the copy was.
Impressed because, well it captured a lot of the basic tropes and twists typical of the genre. Horrified, not at the emerging intelligence of AI (I’m pretty familiar with that). No, I was horrified and humbled at how easily and formulaic putting together a genre story can be.
I guess I already knew this. Stories have a universal structure and archetypal themes. We see them recycled all the time. When its done poorly, by humans, it’s cliche. And that’s mostly what the chatbot cooked up.
The lesson for me is two fold. One, to make good stories, we have to (obviously) push ourselves beyond the conventions of cliche; two, AI story telling IS coming. I’m not one of those people who is going to panic over AI taking my job. The history of technology and work demonstrates to me that, while, yes, technology DOES eliminate some jobs, it creates others too. Those folks who thrive are ones who learn to work with it.
It’s for that reason I’m going to keep playing with chatbots, feeding them set ups from my stories and seeing what fun alternative, parallel, universes they create. I’ll post a screen shot of what the Microsoft chatbot created for me and will provide further updates and examples of what blended stories we can create.
Microsoft’s chatbot attempt at telling me my own story . . .