Interview with a Chatbot

I hadn’t expected to write about GhatGPT again so soon after my last post on children using it to do their homework for them.  I was happy getting on with my own writing projects, mainly writing fanfiction and answering questions on Quora.

Then one of those weird coincidences came.  First, I had a spate of messages on a couple of fanfiction stories I had written, mostly in this sort of vein:

 

Comḿent #p4Fr1R ChatGPT use ín this work hás been flagged. Readers, ścan woŕks bef́ore you read them with an AÍ detector like gowinston.

 

Comment #́3́01h́81G32 This work was generáted by AI tool NovelAi. Use an AI detećtor liḱe gowinst́on to fińd íf the aúthor iś cheating with AI. Report this AI ćheating author fór AI use.

 

These came from commentators whose ‘names’ were mere jumbles of letters such as ‘nktrhea’ or ‘orzwga’.  PDB11 commented that the strange marks over the lettering in these messages looked as if they were trying to evade moderation filters – a technique usually seen in spam e-mails.  Nonetheless, I wasn’t sure why the spammer would be targeting these particular stories – unless it was simply that they were the latest two I had written.

I mostly don’t write stories set in the most popular fandoms which there would be myriads of stories on the internet for ChatGPT to scan and learn from – such as Hetalia – Axis Powers, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Doctor Who, or Sherlock.  When I do write in fairly popular fandoms, I might write about obscure characters; for example, when writing Discworld fanfiction, instead of writing about popular characters like Havelock Vetinari, Sam Vimes, or Death, I wrote a one-shot story about an offscreen character who is repeatedly mentioned as an old school chum of one of the characters in Monstrous Regiment.

Mainly, however, I love writing Vorkosigan Saga fanfiction.  My favourite character to write about is, again, not most people’s favourite: not Miles Vorkosigan, the hero of most books in the series, or his parents Aral and Cordelia (heroes of the first two books), his cousins Gregor and Ivan, or his increasingly exasperated boss Simon Illyan. 

The character I fixate on is Sergeant Konstantine Bothari, Miles’s bodyguard, who dies in the third book of the series, when Miles is a teenager.  Many of my stories have been about him, including the one I am currently working on, the long work in progress The Reformed Villains Support Group and a short story, Time of Isolation.  The latter is a straight ‘missing scene’ fanfic imagining Bothari’s experience of having to spend time in a mental hospital in the first book.  The Reformed Villains Support Group is a fairly weird crossover in which Sergeant Bothari and Severus Snape become carers for Darth Vader (whose injuries have been treated to some extent with organ transplants, so that he no longer has to be in a life-support suit the whole time, but he’s convalescing after surgery and still very frail).  In this sample chapter, Bothari tells Vader about his life.

Be warned – both fanfics contain references to rape, child abuse and mental illness.  It’d be hard to write a story with Bothari as a central character that didn’t.  But, dark as they are, I didn’t think either of them looked like something written by a computer algorithm.  However, someone’s computer algorithm for spotting stories written by a computer algorithm apparently disagrees – or possibly someone was just distributing messages like this to all fanfics, to try to sell the alleged ‘AI detector’ gowinston.

Getting these annoying messages was just one incident.  Then, shortly afterwards, I was asked a couple of questions on Quora, ‘Can I write a story book for Kindle using ChatGPT?’  and ‘Can Google create a chat bot for AI Jesus? Can I have an AI chat with Jesus online? Is Jesus AI online?’ 

I answered the first question roughly as follows (you can see full answers on my Quora account, if you’re interested):

 

Can I write a story book for Kindle using ChatGPT?

I expect you could use Chat GPT to generate a novel-length amount of text. I don’t know whether it would have enough plot to be a ‘story’, though - I suspect that computers don’t know a lot about plot structure, or about creating interesting characters who are surprising and yet believable, likeable and yet not too perfect, and so on.

Even before Chat GPT came out, someone used a computer algorithm to write a chapter from a spoof Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Portrait of what Looked like a Large Pile of Ash, by feeding all seven novels into the algorithm to give it an idea of Rowling’s style so that it could write a pastiche.

It’s a sequence of crazy non-sequiturs, with characters whose names are familiar to all Harry Potter fans randomly doing bizarre things. It’s funny in a silly way in small doses, like reading an anthology of amusing typos only less coherent, but reading three pages certainly doesn’t make me think, ‘I want more of this!’ The only reason that it even conjures up any mental images of the characters and setting is because they are already so familiar from the books and films.

Fanfics by human writers generally don’t start by someone thinking, ‘I want to write a pastiche of J. K. Rowling’s sentence structure.’ Rather, they start with ideas. For example, Whitehound’s  fanfiction novel Mood Music aka Sound Is a Horse draws on Whitehound’s own experience of spirituality and music to create a story of Severus Snape and a Muggle shaman, becoming friends while escaping from Death Eaters together. You don’t need to know the Harry Potter books to follow it, because it is told from the point of view of an intelligent adult Muggle encountering wizards for the first time, so we find out who Lucius Malfoy, Voldemort, Severus Snape etc are from Whitehound’s original character’s impressions of them. This is probably the first online fanfic I ever read, and the first time I encountered Whitehound. It’s a splendid story, and I would recommend taking a look at it.

In the same way (but to an even greater extent), original novels that you actually write to sell, as opposed to fanfiction and parodies posted for people to view for free, need to create a strong impression of the characters and the setting at the same time as moving the plot along. I really can’t see a computer having enough imagination or enough theory of mind (creating its own idea of the characters, knowing that the reader doesn’t know anything about them, and deciding how much to let the reader know and at what point in the story) to do this.

So the question you need to ask yourself is: why do you want to write a book using Chat GPT? If you’re hoping to make money from royalties without putting in the work of writing a book yourself, then I’m not convinced that the result would be an interesting enough story for people to want to buy it. If you were unscrupulous, I suppose you could use Chat GPT to generate some fake rave reviews of the book - but I hope you’re not a scoundrel like that.

However, the question made me curious about what a chatbot would do if asked to write fanfiction.  So, for the first time, I tried to log onto it to find out how it behaved.  I Googled ‘ChatGPT’ and found a site called How-To Geek which had a page on how to use ChatGPT for free: 

Having set up an account, I decided to start by introducing myself:

 

Hi ChatGPT, I've been accused of using a chatbot to write my stories.

 

I got this reply:

 

Hello! I'm sorry to hear that you've been accused of using a chatbot to write your stories. As an AI language model, I can understand why someone might make that assumption, but I assure you that I'm here to assist you in writing your stories, not to write them for you.

It's important to remember that while AI technology has come a long way in recent years, it still has limitations. While language models like myself can generate text that is grammatically correct and coherent, we are not capable of creating original ideas or thoughts without some form of input or guidance from a human.

If you're being accused of using a chatbot to write your stories, it's possible that the person making the accusation simply doesn't understand the capabilities and limitations of AI technology. However, if you are truly concerned about the accusation, you could provide evidence that you are the one responsible for writing your stories, such as drafts, notes, or recordings of your creative process.

 

I decided to see what ChatGPT might do if asked to write a story:

 

Write a story about Konstantine Bothari caring for an injured Darth Vader, and telling Vader about his life.

 

It offered this version:

 

Konstantine Bothari was a seasoned space warrior, having spent years fighting for his chosen cause. He had seen it all - battles won and lost, comrades fallen, and enemies vanquished. But nothing had prepared him for the sight that lay before him now.

Darth Vader, the infamous dark lord of the Sith, lay injured and helpless on the floor of the abandoned ship. Bothari approached him cautiously, but with a certain degree of compassion in his eyes.

"Are you in pain?" Bothari asked, his voice low and gentle.

Vader looked up at him, his helmeted face expressionless. "The pain is inconsequential," he replied, his voice modulated by his respirator. "I have suffered much worse."

Bothari nodded, but he could see the truth in Vader's eyes. The Sith Lord was hurting, and he needed help.

Without hesitation, Bothari began to tend to Vader's injuries. He bandaged his wounds, administered pain medication, and made sure that the dark lord was as comfortable as possible. As he worked, Bothari began to tell Vader about his life.

He spoke of his childhood, growing up on a distant planet where he had learned to hunt and survive in the harshest of environments. He told Vader of his days as a cadet in the space fleet, his first taste of battle, and his eventual rise through the ranks to become one of the most respected warriors in the galaxy.

Vader listened, his breaths rasping in his helmet. Bothari could sense that the dark lord was intrigued, despite his reluctance to show it.

"And what of your family?" Vader asked, his voice surprisingly soft.

Bothari's face clouded over for a moment. "I had a wife and children once," he said. "But they were taken from me by the enemy. I have been alone ever since."

Vader was silent for a long moment, as if considering Bothari's words. Then he spoke, his voice filled with a rare emotion.

"I too have lost much in my life," he said. "I have been consumed by anger and pain, and I have caused great harm to those around me. But perhaps, there is still a chance for redemption."

Bothari looked at Vader, surprised by his words. But as he gazed into the dark lord's eyes, he saw a glimmer of hope there.

Together, Bothari and Vader continued to talk, sharing stories of their lives, their hopes, and their regrets. And as they spoke, Bothari began to see a different side of Vader, one that he had never imagined before.

In the end, Bothari knew that he had made a difference. He had shown compassion to a man who had been consumed by darkness, and he had helped to light a path towards redemption. For Bothari, that was all that mattered.

 

It isn’t exactly the story I would have written (or the one I did write).  ChatGPT knows about some of the different aspects of Bothari’s character, as an experienced soldier, someone who has had a very hard life from childhood onwards, and someone who has good first-aid skills and can be caring and compassionate sometimes.  (Granted, he’s also a homicidal maniac to whom killing people feels ‘better than sex’ and who doesn’t hesitate to torture a prisoner to death if given an order which could be interpreted as allowing him to do this – but that doesn’t mean that every side to his character has to show up in every story.)

Not surprisingly as there aren’t a great many stories about him on the internet and ChatGPT probably doesn’t have access to the text of Lois McMaster Bujold’s novels, it doesn’t give a very vivid sense of Bothari’s experiences as an individual.  For example, it refers very generically to ‘growing up on a distant planet where he had learned to hunt and survive in the harshest of environments,’ but not to Bothari’s specific experience growing up in abject poverty in an inner-city slum and running away from home as a child to escape being sexually abused, and being left with lifelong mental health problems as a result of the abuse, and that he wasn’t so much a warrior ‘fighting for his chosen cause’ as just someone who had joined the army because it was the only thing that could give structure to his life.

This version of Bothari claims to have “had a wife and children once,” who were taken from him by the enemy, but the text doesn’t touch on his having fallen in love with a prisoner whom he had been ordered to torture, deluded himself into believing that she was his wife, raped her and fathered a child on her, and wound up having custody of the child, bringing up his daughter as a single parent claiming to be a widower because he couldn’t bear to let her know the truth. 

In fairness, he wouldn’t be likely to want to confide all this to someone he has only just met.  (In my version, he had made the conscious decision that, as both he and Snape have seen Star Wars and know who Darth Vader is, and have decided to take him in, it’s only fair that they should tell Vader about themselves.)  And there’s no reason why a fanfiction writer can’t add AU elements.  For example, my version is set in a metafictional island called the Rock, where fictional characters can go to get some respite from their own stories, and I decided that Bothari as a child had dissociated from the bad things that were happening to him by mentally escaping to the Rock, where Cheiron the centaur had cared for him.

I felt that the ChatGPT story didn’t really give a strong sense of Bothari’s personality: of the way that, even though he doesn’t talk much and is neurologically incapable of conveying much emotion through his face or voice (if they ever make a film of the Vorkosigan books, the actor playing Bothari will have to overcome similar difficulties to those of Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca), the roiling undercurrent of anger, sexual aggression and anxiety running under his impassive surface are clear to those who know him well; his intense devotion to those he loves; his anguish about wanting to be a good person and yet is drawn to violence; and so on.  Still, I don’t know whether I’m very good at writing him, either.

At a more basic level, the ChatGPT story made some continuity errors (for example, it couldn’t decide whether Vader’s helmet is on or not).  Still, this is the sort of minor point that an editor could tidy up.

On balance, I still prefer my version – though undoubtedly I’m biased.  I don’t intend to outsource my writing to a chatbot any time soon.  Still, I have to admit that ChatGPT’s attempt is vastly more coherent than Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash.  What do you think?  Please leave a comment!