Diogenes in Space! And Doge Eloncles the Musk Merchant
So I was recently playing around with ChatGPT since it's been updated since I last played around with it a bit. While I'm in general horrified about the implications of people using ChatGPT to create content, I wanted to explore its capabilities. It's interesting because while it can create a pretty good little short story on demand, thinking about what said output is _missing_ and trying to push it to improve that is an interesting exercise that probably benefits the human writer.
To make its answers not just pollyanna imaginings without context, I'd kept all my previous questions to it in one chat and told it directly to reference previous topics as much as possible. I had recently been asking it about the philosophies of various philosophers so they featured prominently which I really liked.
We'll skip the first few stories which involved Socrates, Diogenes, and some other characters in ancient Greece trying to thwart Eloncles, a musk merchant (see what I did there? ChatGPT, otherwise insightful, refuses to make any connections) attempting to import various products with dire biosecurity consequences (I told you its based significantly on previous conversations I'd had with it). Originally "a squirrel farmer" was a background character and then I suggested the already introduced scheming merchant was dealing in musk from these squirrels. In the last iteration before we travel to space the musk had taken on some interesting properties akin to the Spice Melange of Frank Herbert's Dune series. Anyway the following results I think are entertaining and ultimately had me laughing to hard I had tears in my eyes.
We'll begin wherein I've asked it to put noted philosopher, founder of "cynism" Diogenes, in the "unwinnable situation" from Star Trek, the Kobayashi Maru scenario. I'll make occasional changes to its version with [] brackets.
( Philosophers In Space )
And what conclusions can we draw from this about the future of AI and AI assisted writing? Well I think it can create interesting content that is worth reading but only with careful prompting. Generally any attempts to make it write something without a lot of steering has created content that's just dumb and pollyanna. I certainly wouldn't have been able to make all this in just a few collective minutes (this was through the day I'd have it make me an interation and then spend the next hour or two carefully thinking how I could steer it then next direction while otherwise going through my workday and then take a moment to give it the next prompt), but the fact that this could go on forever highlights another fundamental thing about writing -- it needs curation. People don't have infinite time to read things, human producers of writing were forced to curate because of the time involved, tehy'd carefully produce the best they could in the time available, with AI content creation one could create a firehose of content, and it would still take a human to make the cuts to present an audience with the appropriate amount of it. And, well, that's promising for me as an editor.

See also, previous (drawn) zany adventures in space.