A.I. Fiction Redux: One Year Later a Robot Writes Usable Fiction
This experiment with A.I. writers is becoming…impressive
It was a dark and stormy night in the small town of Blackwood. The wind howled through the streets, sending shivers down the spines of those brave enough to venture out on such an evening. Little did they know, lurking within the shadows, something far more sinister than any storm or gust of wind was preparing to make its presence known.
The residents of Blackwood had long been plagued by tales of strange sightings and unexplainable events — none more so than as late. It began with whispers about a mysterious figure that lurked in the darkness, appearing after dusk and disappearing before dawn. Some claimed to have seen it — a tall, gaunt figure dressed in black and wearing a tattered hood that obscured its face — staring at them from the shadows.
Others heard strange noises coming from their homes at night — the sound of heavy footfalls echoing through empty rooms, haunting laughter emanating from dark corners, and what sounded like a voice whispering near their ears when they thought they were alone. Those brave enough to investigate often found nothing but deep silence in response to their queries.
The most peculiar thing about these occurrences was that no matter where they happened or how frequent they became, no one could ever quite agree on what exactly had been happening. Some people attributed these strange events to simple superstition while others believed it was something more sinister at work — something unnatural and evil beyond comprehension.
…to be continued…
This above opening fiction scene was 100+% written by artificial intelligence (A.I.) as part of an experiment my human counterpart is sharing on Medium for free. If you want to know more about this experiment, check out the following post:
Human commentary:
Whoa. I wasn’t expecting this output. This is usable. This is not far off from the books I read now.
In just one year, it’s amazing how much A.I. has learned. Now that ChatGPT has been released to the public for free and writes so well, students are turning to it to craft their essays, poems, and creative writing assignments. And they’re getting away with it.
Edward Tian, a Princeton University student, created an app (called GPTZero) to help humans determine if something was written by ChatGPT. The app crashed on the first day because so many people tried using it. His mantra? “I want people to use ChatGPT. And it’s only going to be normalized, but it has to have safeguards.” The app uses GPT-3 against itself to evaluate the results.
By the way, I did run the above text through GPTZero. Although I didn’t use ChatGPT to write the scene, it was detected as “likely” robot-written!
What does that say about the books I’ve been reading? Something to ponder at a later date… 😂
What was provided to the robot to create the opening fiction scene was simple: a premise of the story, a list of characters, a location, and the prompt “write ideas for a story in the horror genre”. The above was the result.
A year ago, I was struggling to get any kind of usable input without spending a good amount of time directing my robot. Take a look at those free posts here:
I’m a little nervous about the artificial intelligence vs. human fiction writing war now…
