I have been playing with machine learning and generative tools over the past few months and I wanted to highlight ChatGPT, a currently free natural language processing chatbot.

Today, I went to over to the Writing Prompts subreddit on Reddit where I grabbed the following prompt:

Your roommate is a hulking demon, a former warlord with millennia of combat experience, and the picture of menace and brutality. You just caught them halfway through a gallon-sized bucket of your favorite ice cream, frozen like a deer in headlights.

u/quazerflame

I put that in ChatGPT with the following message: Can you write me a short story that’s about your roommate is a hulking demon, a former warlord with millennia of combat experience, and the picture of menace and brutality. You just caught them halfway through a gallon-sized bucket of your favorite ice cream, frozen like a deer in headlights.

Here’s what it spat out.

Sure, here’s a short story about a demon warlord and their human roommate:

I walked into the kitchen and was immediately struck by the sight before me. There, in front of the open fridge, stood my roommate – a hulking demon with skin as black as night and eyes that glowed like embers. But it wasn’t the demon’s intimidating appearance that caught my attention. It was the fact that they were halfway through a gallon-sized bucket of my favorite ice cream, frozen like a deer in headlights as I walked in.

I couldn’t help but stare in disbelief as the demon, a former warlord with millennia of combat experience and the picture of menace and brutality, sheepishly held up the half-empty bucket of ice cream. “I’m sorry,” they said, a hint of embarrassment in their voice. “I didn’t mean to eat all of your ice cream. I just couldn’t resist.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of the situation. Here was this fearsome demon, who had probably faced down countless enemies in battle, looking guilty as sin because they’d eaten my ice cream. I shook my head and chuckled, walking over to the fridge to grab a carton of my own.”It’s okay,” I said, opening the carton and scooping out a spoonful of ice cream. “I’m glad you enjoyed it. But maybe next time, you could ask before eating all of someone’s food?”

The demon nodded, looking relieved. “I’ll make sure to do that from now on. Thanks for understanding.”

We sat at the kitchen table and ate our ice cream in companionable silence, both of us grateful for the other’s understanding. And even though my roommate was a demon, I couldn’t help but feel grateful to have them as my friend. The end

It isn’t perfect, and it’s certainly not going to win any awards, but it is, to me, comparable to stuff I would write in middle school or high school and that’s amazing. There are parts that feel creative and the interplay between the two characters is interesting to me.

I can’t help but wonder what this technology will look like two or three years down the road? It feels like it is progressing so quickly.

What do you think? Is this exciting or scary? There are plenty of people talking about tools stealing copyrighted art and using that to train the machine learning models, how do you feel about that? Is it inspirational sources or stealing? Exciting time to be alive, either way!

Note, the image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.