Almost all of this is mine. ChatGPT helped me clean up a sentence or two, but this is almost all me.
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Cat’s headache had gotten worse through the night. Now, with sunrise coming to the bayou, his vision had become a bit blurry from the pain. His shoulder hurt dully from where he’d been burned, but worst of all was his side where the man had stabbed him with a needle. That burned like fire. Like his head, it had gotten worse.
Through a slight haze, he saw the General lying on his side amidst the wreckage in the living room, panting. Cat knew his breathing too well to think he was asleep.
“How are you doing, Beau?”
“Woof,” replied the basset hound. The words sounded in Cat’s head in a rich, baritone voice. “My head feels like it’s about to collapse. The place where the bad men stabbed me with that needle is absolutely on fire.”
“Mine, too,” replied Cat.
Earlier, about fifteen minutes after the changes, the surprise had worn off. The talking without sound. The sharper edges of the world simply were. Things were different now, and that was that—no more remarkable than water being wet or the sun being bright. The men and their needles had done this.
Those men were dead. The gators had seen to that. Cat felt smug satisfaction recalling the explosion in the men’s boat, the splashes and screams.
Cat limped over to where General Beauregard lay on his side. He could hear the General whimpering slightly. This was the first time Cat had ever heard the General complain. The General simply didn’t do that.
Cat set to work cleaning the General’s side where the needle had gone in. General Beauregard barked loudly and angrily at him as soon as his tongue touched the spot. Cat involuntarily leaped back. Beauregard had never barked at him like that.
“Sorry, Beau,” said Cat. “I won’t touch that again.”
“Sorry, Cat. I didn’t mean that.”
“I know. Don’t worry about it.”
Cat moved on to one of the scrapes on General Beauregard’s shoulder and got to work, his raspy, little tongue moving along the basset hound’s fur in a rhythm that calmed them both.
Bobby and Basil were still in their bedrooms, sleeping off their drinking.
“When Bobby comes out, we’re going to be in trouble,” said General Beauregard. “He’s going to think we did all of this.”
Cat didn’t care. Bobby and Basil would yell and wave their hands and a few hours later, dinner would come. Nothing serious ever came of the men’s anger. It simply wasn’t worth paying attention to their yelling.
“I wouldn’t worry about it, Beau. It won’t take them long to see the bow of the sunken skiff. The guys are pretty smart. They’ll figure out what happened,” replied Cat.
4 comments:
That is rather dramatically better than the mostly-AI items. Punchier, and there is clearly a conscious mind behind it that is taking the narrative someplace.
Thanks, Tim. It really mattered to me what you had to say.
You're welcome. In general, I think that on your own you are a pretty good writer. Aside from anything you might be doing off of this blog, simply writing darned near every day for almost 20 years is going to help a lot. And your base writing ability is, in a lot of ways, much better than what AI can currently do.
While I don't use AI myself, I am seeing a lot of our students trying to use it. And I've come to the conclusion that I can't tell for sure whether something was writted by an AI or not, because AI is currently the equivalent of a college freshman with a thesarus, a good grammar guide, and a high typing speed. But, I can still tell good writing from bad, and in general AI encourages a particular type of bad writing - rambling, repetitious, not really making a point or reaching a conclusion, and with a generous sprinkling of serious factual errors. You know, the way a freshman writes once you remove the grammatical errors. What I have been telling them is that they may be able to use AI as a tool, but they ultimately are responsible for the quality of the product. Which means that the AI may make suggestions, but they ultimately still have to do the work to make sure it is good quality. Even if it means taking 5-10 pages of AI output, and ultimately throwing out, distilling, or rewording it all down to a single paragraph.
Topic for a future blog post: What if AI captures and preserves the current culture - artistic, for example - in aspic? That is, if all it does is regurgitate its training data and young artists use that tool, from where will the revolutions in art come?
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