, asking for a title, tagline, key characters, and plot details and suggesting the topic “a horror film set on an oil rig.” Then the user let OpenAI’s new software do its work. The results are astonishing: There’s dramatic tension, fleshed-out characters, and hints of a dark secret. It promises explosive action, and maybe even a touch of political commentary.
It is yet another example—and there are many that have made the rounds on social media, WhatsApp chats, and the WIRED Slack in the past week—of the seemingly magical powers of ChatGPT. The AI chatbot is trained on text from books, articles, and websites that has been “cleaned” and structured in a process called supervised learning. ChatGPT can write code, make up songs, and compose limericks and haiku. It remembers what it has written and makes careful edits upon request. It takes even the most random prompts in stride, composing stories that neatly tie competing strands together: Details that seem irrelevant in the first paragraph pay off in the last.
All of this makes playing around with ChatGPT incredibly fun, charmingly addictive, and—as someone who writes for a living—really quite worrying. But you soon start to sense a lack of depth beneath ChatGPT’s competent prose. It makes factual errors, conflating events and mixing people up. It relies heavily on tropes and cliché, and it echoes society’s worst stereotypes.
It’s the same in publishing, where narrow trends can sweep the industry and dominate for years at a time, lining bookshop shelves withThe Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
For programming the tool gives power and great assistance so far, it easily replaced Google in my case.