The Man in Black [LF2021] ---Written by AI---

If the mods don't want to allow this to be an entry in the writing competition that's fine, they can't really award an AI. I just thought it would be an interesting experiment to generate a short story with AI using the current theme. The following story was generated by GPT-Neo 2.7B and the prompt used was "Legends of the Fall by G.P.T."



It was during the long hours of afternoons and evenings that she had first seen him: an intense, yet strangely distant man, who wore only black; whose features were hidden under his hat of heavy black felt. She did not know his name; she did not know where he was from, nor with whom he traveled. She did not know anything about him except that he had a very strange way of moving, and the way he looked: his eyes, which were a little too close together, a little too deeply set; and he was very tall, but she could never quite place where he stood from. And yet, there was a strange gentleness about him, which led her to think that perhaps he was a friend of the family. And when she could see him no more for the evening, she would always have the impression that he was only a figment of her imagination.

She would often dream about him, and the dreams invariably had him wearing a black hat and a dark coat. But even in her dreams he remained distant. She could not help noticing his eyes, which were very large and quite round, with black rings around them. There was something so strange about them but she thought that they were very nice; the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen. They were like black diamonds. And they never moved; if they moved, it was only to wink, as if to say 'Hello' or 'How are you?'. There was something about the way he looked that made her think he must be a very interesting man. In the nights when she lay awake, half thinking about him, she would often close her eyes, and just as the black rings were beginning to become blurred, as though a dream were settling into the darkness of sleep, she saw him again in her mind.

He was standing at the top of a flight of steps in a hall which had black walls and a blue carpet, and she could hear the sound of a piano inside. She saw him now with his hat and coat on, and his eyes were turned towards the piano. His face was a little pale, and there were dark circles around his eyes, and his hair was all disheveled. Everything was different somehow, everything was different. She would watch him very intently and she would find there was a faint smile playing about his mouth. She thought maybe he was waiting for her, but he never before made the slightest effort to approach her, and she never, not even in a dream, managed to see a single thread of desire in his expression. And she would go about her work with a smile on her face, a smile which was as cold and as distant as his eyes.

As she lay half-awake, her eyes would open then close, and she would see him standing there on the staircase. He waited now, and she knew that he must be waiting for someone, and was just wondering, quite innocently, what he would be waiting for. He had been there so long, was he in the hall all of his own accord? He had been watching the door for so long. Then there was a little movement towards the door, and she heard the faintest of footfalls and knew that it must be him. And then he began to descend the stairs, the only sound to be heard now, and a sort of silence fell across the stairs as he passed them. The next thing she knew, he was standing at the foot of the stairs in front of her. His face was all dark now; he looked as if he was angry. 'What are you doing here?' he said. And then he reached out his hand to touch her hair.

'I thought I was alone,' she explained. 'I thought I was.'

'And were you?' he asked.

'Yes,' she said. She tried to smile. 'You're not mad, are you?' she whispered.

'No,' he answered. 'I haven't got a hat on.'

'Oh,' she said. 'I suppose you're not. I thought you were.'

But she could not see that his eyes were wet. He had his hat in one hand, and he held it against his chest.

'You had my heart,' he said. 'And now I've left it.'

'Don't,' she said. 'Don't cry.'

'It's true,' he said. 'I have lost my heart. But you haven't lost yours yet.'

So... are you saying that this entire story is not yours... but a generated story from an algorithm of some form?

If that is the case and you have no hand in the actual creative-thinking portion of the story other than entering some variables... I'm going to say no.. it wouldn't be fair to the other Contestants. And it also wouldn't be fair as there are no other "AI" entries for your story to compete against.

That last sentence was mean't to be humorous, (just in case I failed).


Why not create one of your own?
Johnny

a reply to: JohnnyAnonymous

Yes it's generated by an algorithm. I've written plenty of short stories, I just thought this would be an interesting experiment. I agree it's probably not fair to other contestants, but I doubt this story will win anyway. If the AI did win though it would be very impressive, because it would require advanced creative writing skills. What's scary is that I'm not even using the best AI which is publicly available, I'm using the largest one which would fit in my RAM.

I will say this, it was quite intriguing to read that. I've read things generated by AI before that didn't come close to that . They were too obvious. This one I could almost swear was written by a human hand.
Eerie.

I had no idea things had progressed so far.

The story was slightly disjointed for me but maybe that was something I was looking for since I knew it was A.I. written. What a wonderful tool a person could use to write a paragraph if you had writers block ??!! S&F and thanks for posting

a reply to: AccessDenied

Absolutely! Based on this, I can see how people can get into "weird" relationships with AI bots.

This piece certainly has a human quality to it. Perhaps it loses some realism in the dialogues, I'd like to see a longer conversation to gauge how it copes.

I think GPT-Neo needs to join ATS!

a reply to: ChaoticOrder

Interesting, but Johnny is correct, it can get votes and all, but would not be an official winner, only the most vote getter.

And it is scary.
Some day, people who want to have a best seller won't even need ghost writers.

a reply to: ChaoticOrder

Excuse me, but ...

'You're not mad, are you?' she whispered.

'No,' he answered. 'I haven't got a hat on.'

Love the non-sequitur.

Cheers

a reply to: F2d5thCavv2

That was what gave it away to me it was a AI written piece.I dont have a hat on. so he has to have a hat on to be mad? lol.

originally posted by: yuppa
a reply to: F2d5thCavv2

That was what gave it away to me it was a AI written piece.I dont have a hat on. so he has to have a hat on to be mad? lol.

Mad as a hatter!



PS: I don't quite believe this was written entirely by AI. It does seem very human.

a reply to: chr0naut

PS: I don't quite believe this was written entirely by AI. It does seem very human.

To be honest I wrote one part of this story, and it was "a figment of her imagination", because when I generated the first paragraph it stopped at "always have the impression that he was only", and it seems pretty obvious to me what should come after that. Then I increased the word limit so it could generate the rest of the story in one go using the first paragraph as the prompt. I did also fix some minor grammatical issues, but apart from that this story is 99% the work of AI.

a reply to: yuppa

The other reason this story probably seems like a human wrote it is because I removed a couple of nonsensical sentences. But the line about him not wearing a hat was so funny I had to leave it in, plus I thought there might be some meaning to it which I just wasn't seeing.

Also, I should probably say that the exact prompt I used to generate the first paragraph wasn't just "Legends of the Fall by G.P.T." it was this:

Legends of the Fall by G.P.T.

Chapter 1

Having the newlines then "Chapter 1" helps the AI recognize it should be writing a story. Just thought that might be useful information for anyone trying this for themselves.

a reply to: Encia22

Something else I should mention is this story wasn't the first story generated by the AI. It was about the 3rd or 4th story I generated. That's why I started by generating just the first paragraph, because it's much quicker than generating a whole short story. Once I had a starting paragraph which sounded good, I used it as the prompt to generate the rest of the story. I only did two attempts to generate the full story, which is to say I didn't really cherry pick the dialog it generated like I did with the first paragraph. I'm sure it could generate much better dialog if I gave it more attempts, but I felt the dialog it generated was somehow meaningful even if it didn't totally make sense.

It's funny you should bring up the topic of conversational dialog, because I have tested these AI's to see how well they perform as chat bots. The very interesting thing is, you can use a prompt like this:

Chat log between USER and BOT on 1/1/2021

USER: hi!
BOT:

The AI will then generate a response from that prompt. Obviously you can replace USER and BOT with names of your own choosing, and the name you choose for the bot will influence its personality, which I find extremely interesting. You can keep feeding the conversation back to the AI, and what you have is a chat bot. But it's not just like any chat bot, it's a chat bot which has a general understanding of the world, for example it can write short stories like this one, it can even write fairly complex computer code. So you're chatting with a fairly intelligent AI, which takes on a personality which corresponds to the name you give it, and that's pretty amazing. If anyone wants the conversational Python code I wrote just let me know and I will share it.

a reply to: ChaoticOrder

This is a big wow for sure but I’d be interested to know what would happen if you did the whole process again with exactly the same terms. Would the same story be produced or would a completely different one be created. Or even a combination of the two.

I also wonder if any of the sentences and phrases would turn up wholly in tact with a google search. I’m sure AI’s are not above plagiarism.

a reply to: merkins

You would get a different story every time even if you used the same prompt, but you would probably get similar results if you did it enough times, but it also depends on the complexity of the prompt. I suspect if you searched this story on Google you might find some small segments of the story match other stories out there, because it was trained on a lot of data scraped from the web. But it's probably mostly original, the way these AI's work is based on choosing the most likely words to come next in a sentence, and you can alter the "temperature" of the AI so the text generated is more or less predictable. I used a temperature between 0.85 and 0.9 to generate this story, meaning it should be fairly original.

a reply to: ChaoticOrder

It’s fascinating and scary at the same time.

I could see this being merged with deep fakes to hide a politicians dementia and create a believable fake Joe Biden or similar responding to questions at a televised interview. Or even used in the fake White House with all the press in on the scam. It would certainly be more coherent than some politicians real performances.

I wonder how long it will be before students start using AI like this to write their papers.

You know the last two lines?

Is that just figuratively or (much as I don't like the idea of it) literal?