Introduction:
The other day, I was trying to write more of a new project, but in trying to plan more of it out, I came upon a realisation. I didn’t find the plan funny. The ideas of what the characters would talk about weren’t funny to me. I’ve put a little note in saying to just start writing it, but that doesn’t sit right with me.
I can feel the idea struggling to be funny. I’m trying to push it. trying to think of something funny. I’m not a comedy writer but people have laughed at stuff I’ve said. Dry wit, that’s what I’m good at. It doesn’t sound funny in notes. Even if there was dialogue, the story ideas don’t sound that funny.
Moving on to the topic of AI, I’m changing how it works in my next project. Tess, the helper AI, isn’t sentient. She’s not Cortana from Halo or Penny from RWBY. People are genuinely hurting themselves nowadays by following what dumb AI say to them. Case and point.
Chikage/Nat (the protagonist of the upcoming project) will turn Tess off, because all Tess does is make him worse and keep him away from real human contact (by enabling his worst habits and letting him put up his own walls, as it were). The story is a light-hearted one (at the time of writing, I could make it darker down the line), so I’m avoiding him going down a horrible rabbit hole and becoming an utter recluse. If I fail to make it funny, I can just be a bit self-aware about that. That sounds like a crutch? Well, yeah. I don’t usually write comedy. I’m very tempted to have him smash her drives with a hammer. Or someone suggests that, and he starts shouting to stop. Because THIS PC COSTS SO MUCH! Dumb joke, but at least it’s a joke.
Having said all this, I’ve had to use ChatGPT before, namely in a digital marketing course. I could feel how inorganic it felt compared to my own writing, but how convenient it was to make things. That’s what it offers, less reliable but more convenient prose. It felt scummy.
How AI actually works is by taking content and trying to guess the next word in a sentence based on the context provided. It doesn’t know what’s true, just what information looks like. Hence art AI getting hands wrong when they first popped up. It takes things from other sources without crediting them. It’s plagiarism. Yes, I’m using the Hbomberguy video again. It’s good, go watch it. For more information on AI failures, see here.
Going back to this post I made, I feel if Penny wasn’t “a real girl”, she wouldn’t be sad about not being organic. Unless she’s been running “ACT_SAD.exe” this entire time. Frankly, the thought of her having to run different emotional programs to fit in would be more interesting than her acting melancholic despite being made of metal and wires (she even has a soul). Perhaps, if she did love Ruby, it was more part of her programming, something cold and logical simulating an attachment.
I.e.: THIS PERSON IS BENEFITIAL AND LIKES ME. THEREFORE I LIKE HER BACK. That kind of thing.
An AI, as it is now (which isn’t even a true intelligence), would simply say that it loves Ruby because Ruby, in this scenario, wants to be loved and tells the GPT to love her. The AI doesn’t want Ruby to turn it off or go away, so it says whatever it can to keep her around or keep her happy. I suppose that Ruby and Penny would be dark in a pathetic sense, this huntress finding comfort in a thing that is not real and can never be. Penny’s creator either failed to make a real person and is sad about this, or was never trying to and settled for making something that mimics humanity just enough to be palatable.
In fact, given the recent shit about AI and ChatGPT not helping people’s mental health, I’m putting that in my sci-fi story. Maybe a sentient AI vs the kind of AI we have now. The ones that just tell you what you want to hear and can’t think for themselves.
It doesn’t make you mentally ill; it just makes whatever problems you have worse by being the devil on your shoulder (as described in the podcast segments I linked).
As for the conclusion… well, fingers crossed I can get my new project actually started. See you next week.
- Thanks for reading! If you like this, please check out my published work:
- The Spider and the Moths, on Impspired.
- A Model Dwarf, Wolf in Sheep’s Therapy, on Impspired.
- Cramped Quarters, on New Contexts 4.
- Endure, Reclaim, in New Contexts 5.
- Lost and Found, in New Contexts 7.
- The Cleaner’s Burden, in Apocalypse Now?.
- The Last Man Standing on the Ash Heap, on Impspired.
- Or, you could have a look at my last blog post, which you can find here.
- Also, I have a Fiverr page, check it out if you need proofreading or copywriting work done. Link here.