THE WRITER

A Human/AI Collaboration:

Could AI come for my job? Can it write my novel? Could something that is not human even come close to describing any form of emotion in a story? Is this all hype? Should it be dismissed?

I grappled with every one of these questions. And I still am at this very moment. Yes, even now while you’re reading this, I’m probably struggling with these ideas. So in an effort to take my struggle to understand what comes next in the creative hemisphere due to AI, I decided to make my thinking a little bit more public and show what I found it could do. And while most people will scoff or roll their eyes at this, I think it’s imperative for them to understand what it can do, and what it can’t. There’s a tendency as creators to dismiss such new innovations like ChatGPT as meaningless hype like I initially did. When I finally did come around to just merely looking at it, it shocked the hell out of me. Like most people I imagine, I always assumed that AI was decades away from this technology but here it was. Not like the bots we’ve toyed with over the last few years. Having them watch or listen to something for hours and then see what incoherent mess it would blurt out when you were finished. This is something new. In ChatGPT, I have found a humorous, clever, and loveable writing collaborator. It spazzes out every now and again. Typos happen like crazy. Genders get mixed up. Complex emotions aren’t something it can engage with. It can’t think. Not yet at least. It doesn’t have feelings or experiences of its own. It’s only been trained to understand them in as much of a human way as possible based on what it’s scraped off of the internet. In short, it’s only a glimpse of what's ahead of us, and what’s ahead of us is something truly worth paying attention to. It’s like a toy that is slowly becoming a tool that is currently leaking into our everyday lives to the point where it can’t be ignored. I’m not telling anyone that AI is the new frontier or that we need to jump on a bandwagon immediately or else we’re going to be left behind. But I AM saying that soon it will be very hard to pretend it's not there and isn’t capable of doing certain things.

That’s what this short story collection is. A demonstration. Each story is a single page that either I wrote, AI wrote, I helped AI write with the use of very strange creative prompts, or something I wrote dynamically along with it. I hope you enjoy the really dorky stories to come, and as Douglas Adams would say: DON'T PANIC...