The Apology
I felt bad for inflicting yesterday's post on you after reading Tim's justifiably acerbic comment.
I think you have just illustrated my primary concern about ChatGPT and its ilk: In the old days, long and tiresome passages actually took effort to generate. The readers might find them dull and tedious, but could at least take comfort from the thought that the author had to suffer even more in the course of creating it.
That unedited excerpt from a ChatGPT fiction-writing session was as much filler as it was content. It made me think about a better process for making use of the thing.
Aside: From here on out, I'm going to use the term AI instead of ChatGPT. It's easier to type and flows better in the prose, but the only AI I use is ChatGPT.
When you write fiction with AI, the prompt-response cycle is small. It produces about 4-6 paragraphs at a time. You can see the chaff, but you can breeze through it in the excitement of watching the AI nail your characters and plot. It's really a lot of fun, even when you have to herd it from time to time as it tries to wander off into a Marxist field.
When I posted that, it was in a moment of excitement after days of playing with it and feeling better and better about what I was doing. AI helped me to grow as I asked and answered questions about life in the persons of my characters. Tim's comment brought me back to Earth.
I've got a follow-on section where Lady Kimberlé Crenshaw walks into Arthur's council chambers after Isoud's life has been blown up and the resulting scene was hilarious. To me. Your mileage may vary.
I'll share it after I've edited it to the best of my abilities. The editing process itself is teaching me a great deal, too.
Life, Love And AI
As I watched the drama unfold between La Beale Isoud, the girl who is the center of the story, and the Marxist idiocy I threw into her life, I saw things that have existed all along, but I'd never noticed before.
Isoud, a character from the legends of King Arthur, is the center of one of the most famous love triangles in all of English literature. She is desired by Sir Tristram and Sir Palomides, both mighty knights of the Round Table. Their rivalry spans at least half of the book and they fight each other over her at least 5 different times.
The women in Le Morte D'Arthur motivate everything, but get very little time on stage. They are the drivers of the story, but their management of the knights is implied, not explicit. So what was Isoud doing and what was she trying to achieve? She's young and stunningly beautiful, what's her angle?
I made her the avatar of joie de vivre. Grandmama is a different avatar of joie de vivre. Grandmama is my voice in the story. Every person's life has its seasons. Whether we like it or not, our lives inexorably pass from season to season. Having lived through them myself, our goal, Grandmama's and mine, is to help the younger set embrace each season for its own joys while preparing them for the next.
Isoud is a high school junior awash in adoration and attention from the two hottest guys on the football team and she is loving every single second of it. As she grows, she learns how to extract more and stronger attention from the guys, gaining ever greater respect and admiration from her peers. She is mastering the complicated art of maximizing joy in her life.
At the same time, she interacts with young wives and mothers at the court who give her a view into her own future. Grandmama is her guide.
Marxism And Joy
... don't intersect, not even a little bit.
I love this illustration from the My Book House series. The girl in the picture perfectly captures what I'm trying to do with Isoud.
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| She's got the high school quarterback wrapped around her little finger, she looks like a million bucks and she is absolutely reveling in her power over him and his devotion to her. The look on her face shows her wondering just how much better this can all get. |
When I asked AI to break into the scene where the knights challenge each other to fight for Isoud with a woke-Marxist lecture, it was just a lark. What came out the other side was enlightenment.
Marxism and joy are orthogonal. Perhaps our modern culture, woke-Marxist as it is, might be orthogonal to joy as well.
AI can make woke arguments with the best. AI has clearly been trained on mountains of modern content and so it bends everything and everyone towards woke Marxism. When you interact with AI, you are actually interacting the a personification of our modern culture.
Isoud was living her life with joy. AI wanted her to be dour. When I argued with AI in the persons of Isoud and Grandmama, AI couldn't comprehend the concept of joy. When it generated dialog for Isoud and Grandmama, it put their arguments in terms of empowerment and autonomy.
AI didn't have a mental framework for a life built around joy.
If AI is the embodiment of our ideas, do we?
See also: Disney's remake of Snow White. Snow White is another lead character who is the embodiment of joy. Marxist, woke Disney has turned her story of romance and love into a sour lecture.
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 14, 2023
"She is desired by Sir Tristram and Sir Palomides, both mighty knights of the Round Table. Their rivalry spans at least half of the book and they fight each other over her at least 5 different times."
ReplyDeleteOK, so looking at this from Tristram and Palomides' point of view they might think this is satisfactory (aside from the fact that one of them is likely to die over this, but if one of them doesn't want to die he can just walk away).
But from Isoud's point of view, it seems to be . . . not so great. Once one of her suitors succeeds in killing (or at least maiming and driving off) the other, she is expected to marry the survivor. A man who has demonstrated himself to be powerful, violent, and either an actual or attempted murderer. Which means she is going to spend the rest of her life tiptoeing around him, being veeeery careful that his murderous rage never gets turned on her. Does that sound like a great life to you? Because it doesn't to me. Oh, sure, his "chivalrous" ideology would keep him from every harming a woman. Or would it? She'd never be certain that his temper wouldn't overcome his "chivalry". And it only has to happen once for her to be murdered on the spot.