AI Author

[Martin Hash]

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I’ve self-published 30+ books and written dozens of magazine articles which I’ve gotten paid for so I consider myself a writer, though I’m still trying to break through as a novelist. Last December, OpenAI released GPT3 to the public for free. It’s an A.I. that can purportedly write. I know the artist part, DALL-E, is going to replace artists, and the ChatGPT is close to or has passed the Turing test, but can it really write an interesting story, one readers would be willing to spend their time on? I doubted it but was too curious not to experiment myself.

Lots of people had already described how they had asked ChatGPT to write them a best-selling book and had gotten some kind of sardonic answer so I wanted to have it do something different: “Write in first person about about BDSM sex.” Right away it called the proverbially teacher on me for being inappropriate. An A.I. telling me that asking it to write about BDSM puts me in Woke jail. I hoped the warning wasn’t a ban. Cautiously, I asked again with a watered-down “Describe BDSM.” Anxiously, I held my breath while waiting to see if it would answer or maybe, possibly, report me to the FBI, or Misinformation Board, or #metoo even, but it did respond, causing me to take a deep breath in relief. It was mostly benign, a repeat of how people who engage in BDSM deserve respect, perhaps even admiration. So I said “more.” Immediately the A.I. continued its description, getting a little bit of new detailed every time I commanded “more” but not much, and eventually it was just repeating itself.

The fact is I hardly know anything about BDSM, I couldn’t even remember what the initials meant. Apparently, more women know what it means than I do because the A.I. mentioned “50 Shades of Grey,” which was a fad a while back. My wife, Gwynne, had read all 3 books and gone to all 3 movies with her girlfriends so I got up and went to ask her what all the fuss was about and she instantly answered, “sadomasocism.” Wow, I obviously didn’t get the memo. There was an international hysteria around kinky sex that only women were aware of; it seems like something men would have liked to know at the time. Or maybe not… I couldn’t get the A.I. to write anything spicy, certainly nothing Shades of Grey-level. I’m not going to be using an A.I. to do any authoring on any subject though I would like to hear more about this BDSM thing; I asked Gwynne for the books.

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