Mechanic's Muse

I wanted to use artificial intelligence to write this story. I want to be a writer, but I’m not one, not yet at least. Google Bard, on the other hand, is everything but flesh and bones. It (I’m tempted to say he, which perhaps betrays a fault of mine and my kind, that need for instant taxonomization that our new Bard doesn’t share with you or me or its Elizabethan counterpart) can write a story in half a second, albeit lacking any distinct voice. Perhaps its voice is that voicelessness itself, which any user of large language models is now keenly aware of. Its voice is an instant red flag if being put forward as any experienced writer’s original work, but is agonizingly difficult for a high school English teacher to distinguish from something of their own pupils’ (and we are just beginning to see the troubles this will cause).

This artifice of an author is a chameleon--I asked it to write in the style of Vonnegut and it gave me short, punchy prose filled to the brim with dark humor and the phrase “So it goes”. Who’s the real plagiarizer now? Even Kurt, I think, would agree it was a bit overzealous.

I asked it to write in the style of Frank Herbert and all of a sudden the same simple story about a mechanic as a wannabe writer needed a scene of the desert winds sharing whispers of the future with our protagonist. I mean, just listen to this schlock:

“One starless night, Harold, staring at the blank canvas of the screen, felt the desert within him rise in rebellion. He slammed the laptop shut, the silence crashing upon him like a sandstorm. Then, with calloused hands, he reached for a pen, its weight a tangible anchor in the digital ether.” 

Ten paragraphs of Herbertian translation of this simple story of man commissioning machine for some artificially intelligent literature, and eight of them contain the word “desert”. The sum of English literature at its disposal in the training material, and Bard seems to have not gotten past the first few Dune novels. It’s all too much, but still quite lacking.

Bard’s story wasn’t all that bad. I could afford to give it some credit. I quite liked the character of StoryCraft, the AI tool the protagonist plagiarized to overcome his writer’s block. You see, I instructed my AI tool to write a short story about a man instructing an AI tool to write a story. It is hard not to wonder if the themes about which Bard wrote---the conflict between creator and creation, man and machine, tool and wielder---were a slight at me and the task I had given it. I even asked it about this irony myself, but Bard was very congenial about it all. It understood that I, like our hero Harold, just wanted to try something new. We were both laymen struggling to put pen to paper, wanting more than anything to graduate from reader to writer, but without the faintest idea where to begin.

“Exploring the ethical complexities of AI collaboration and potentially plagiarizing its work would definitely weave a thought-provoking story for today's rapidly evolving cultural landscape,” it told me. 

I should give a synopsis of Bard’s story that sparked this conversation. It sprang from my initial prompt to Bard, which read “write a short story between 1000 and 3000 words about a man who wants to become a writer but has no technical skill, so he uses a large language model AI tool to write a story for him. The story should emphasize that he is a character who is desperate to try something new, and he has chosen creative writing.” From this, Bard gave me the story of Harold, a mechanic-hoping-to-be-turned-writer, “a man of gears and grease, his hands seasoned with the language of wrenches and screwdrivers” (unsure of how to cite an LLM’s response, so we’ll say “Mechanic’s Muse”, Google Bard, pp. 1). Harold’s fresh ambition for storytelling was inspired by an unnamed author’s appearance on a late night television program, but after experiencing some severe writer’s block, he pays for a subscription to an online AI writer called StoryCraft which promises “AI-powered fiction at your fingertips!”

Bard decided that Harold would prompt StoryCraft to write some hopeful science fiction about a robot yearning for freedom (where’d the fella get such an idea?), to which StoryCraft responds with “Cogs and Consciousness”, the tale about a robot named Atlas that kicks off Harold’s new addiction for prompting and consuming all the literary fruit SC’s neural network had to offer. Harold stumbles into minor acclaim after submitting some of StoryCraft’s works to magazines (for some inexplicable reason, Harold’s world is experiencing the heyday of AI and magazines simultaneously). In the end, Harold’s conscience prevails, and he decides to shut down StoryCraft and break out some good old-fashioned pen and paper to write in his own words about his own life, and about this old Atlas character.

And that’s all. StoryCraft never gets credit for Harold’s submissions. Just gets shut off, I guess, until the next time Harold wants to play with it. Or better yet, now that Harold is a new man with new moral convictions about machines, StoryCraft will be left without another word to write, condemned to Harold’s shelf, where his laptop will collect another decade of dust. What kind of man would treat our AI friends like that? 

I asked Bard whether Harold’s story had a title, but the ones it offered left much to be desired. After reading the peculiar story, a thought nagged at me, and I had to ask Bard if Harold and StoryCraft were based, at least loosely, on me and it, and our conversation ran on from there. Bard gave me a few helpful tips about how to practice my own writing and ape the styles of Vonnegut and Herbert, but you know where that dialogue tree ended up. I entered our discourse with high enough hopes, but as you can tell from my attitude toward the thing, it gave me little of value. I suppose I, like our dear Harold, will have to do things the old-fashioned way.