Just for fun, I put the first chapter of my new book into chatGPT as a prompt. What came back blew my mind. The AI chatbot moved my story in an entirely new direction. The writing wasn’t wonderful, but the plotting amazed me. I’m not going to claim that I can let the chatbot write my next book. It’s not that good yet. But I have to give it an A for creativity.
I’m a big fan of artificial intelligence. Modern deep learning systems are based on neural networks. These programming structures mimic how we thing the brain works. Large neural networks like chatGPT work in ways that no one understands. The program learns on its own. I won’t try to go into any details about how it works. I have an advanced degree in computer science and I get lost after the first few paragraphs.
The bottom line is that chatGPT trained itself on billions of documents ranging from books to websites. It learned how humans write. When I started a story and entered it as a prompt, the computers used their acquired knowledge to extend the story. Boy, did it ever! It decided my original protagonist activity was a dead end and quickly shifted the plot in an entirely new direction. What bothers me is that the chatbot is right. Its direction is much more interesting.
Even though I have some idea of how it did it, I’m still amazed. I’m not sure I will accept the change in direction, but I have to acknowledge that chatGPT may be a great book editor.