Ask A Genius 919: ChatGPT and Stories
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/04/20
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: So, we’re talking about ChatGPT and AIs in general and how they, when they get more intelligent, will be able to break stories, which is both good and bad. So, as an experiment, I asked a cheap GPT called Claude a question, and this is simple: Claude, I’m sure there’s a version of Claude that you can subscribe to for money that is more data-rich. It’s probably got a bigger model, but this is just regular free Claude anyway. I asked what are 15 possible ways that, in a romcom, a 32-year-old African-American male who works as a CPA could meet a newly divorced 31-year-old woman who works in brand management. Claude wrote back within or less than a second: Here are 15 potential meet cute scenarios for a romantic comedy involving a 32-year-old African-American male…
1) They get stuck in the same broken elevator. It goes into more detail; I’m just shortening them up.
2) He’s an accountant hired to do her firm’s taxes.
3) Their dogs get loose at a dog park.
4) Set up on a disastrous blind date by friends but end up clicking.
5) He’s auditing a store she helped re-brand, and they spar over the new image.
6) They’re both summoned for jury duty.
7) She spills coffee on them while rushing into their office building lobby. So, this is the only one. One of the scenarios would involve running into each other or tripping, so this one’s right on the verge of that. If I were the bookie, would I pay off for that one?
8) They argue over who had the reservation at a restaurant. There’s probably one table.
9) He’s hired to fix her computer or handle her IT issue.
10) They live in the same apartment and run into each other doing laundry.
11) She’s a guest speaker for an accounting seminar he’s attending.
12) Their competing companies are co-sponsoring a charity event.
13) He’s the entertainment hired for a friend’s birthday party. That’s not true, but he could be an entertainer in his spare time.
14) Their respective best friends start dating each other.
15) They reach for the last item on the shelf at the grocery at the same time.
So, these are all serviceable, and I’ve seen versions of many of these in romcoms. So, it’s different from Claude watching a bunch of movies. Claude can’t do that, but somebody translated the plots and wrote summaries of the plots for thousands of romcoms, so Claude has a probabilistic landscape of how romcoms work. I’d like to ask Claude for 15 more, and none of them are geniuses on their own, but many of these scenarios could be made serviceable with some imagination and some decent dialogue. You’re not going to get a genius new idea out of AI, but you will ensure you’ve got a well-rounded idea of how people meet in romcoms if you were overlooking something. This might trigger your creativity. So, it’s both good and highly corrosive.
You could make the same argument. In the last few sessions, we’ve talked about AI-generated pornography, and you could make the same argument that it’s good because it gives you an endless supply of stuff to jerk off to. It’s good because these images aren’t of actual women. So, the possibility of human misery that goes along with looking at pornography, which has photos of actual women, because it’s hard to know whether the women are small business people making their way in the world or whether they were coerced into it by a bad boyfriend or a gang that does sex slaves. It’s the same argument that all these easy machine-generated ideas and imagery are corrosive to the imagination and corrupting. The conclusion is that it’s not going away.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That’s also true.
Rosner: So, it’s better to futz around with it and get an idea of what it’s capable of, or at least what we’re dealing with.
[Recording End]
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