CHAT BORED

If you're a regular reader of this blog (hello, all few of you!), you've noticed  there's been a dearth of postings recently. Whether this is they typical end-of-the-year distractions or just old age draining my creative juices is hard to say. But I was heartened to read that I just might have the chance to recharge the ol' triple-A batteries in my brain -- or, truthfully, take the easy way out -- by using a ghostwriter -- free, anytime of day or night without a complaint. 

Am I talking about your typical desperate freelance writer eager to be taken advantage of? Happily, no. It isn't even human. Meet ChatGPT, the answer to writer's block, a tight deadline, or just plain laziness.

ChatGPT is a bot that will... Well, I'm already so lazy that I'll just cut and paste its creators' description: 

We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests. ChatGPT is a sibling model to Instruct GPT, which is trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response.

Admit mistakes? Well, that already puts it in the non-human category. Challenge incorrect premises and reject inappropriate requests? There is no CEO in the world who would hire this thing. Hell, if ChatGPT had a family, it would be thrown out of the house.

So from my standpoint, all it would be good for is something closer to creative writing (Ahh, creative writing! The major with no real life purpose!). While I've often referred to myself as a robot when talking about background acting -- er, extra work -- this seemed a good opportunity to try out the real thing. After signing up to use ChatGPT, I decided to initially go easy with my potential new writing partner, and, instead of an essay, asked for a poem about Donald Trump. The instantaneous result was as follows:

Donald Trump, a man so fine 

With a comb-over that's divine 

His skin so orange, his suit so gold 

He's the president, or so we're told

His tweets so clever, his words so sweet 

He's the best, he can't be beat 

His hair may blow in the summer breeze 

But his ego is sturdy, it will never cease

His name is known far and wide 

He's the king of the White House, oh how he tries 

To make America great again 

But his efforts are met with disdain

Despite the fuss and all the noise 

Donald Trump, our dear old boy 

Will always have a special place In the history books, with a smile on his face.

I wasn't expecting Robert Frost, but, frankly, this was closer to "Frosty the Snowman". Would I get a better result if I asked ChatGPT to write in the style of Shakespeare? It took a little longer to write than the first, but you tell me:

In the land of America, a leader did reign 

With a comb-over that didst defy the mane 

His skin was orange, his suit was gold 

His Twitter finger, never did grow old

His name was Trump, and he was great 

Or so he thought, with every tweet he did state 

He spoke in lies, and in half-truths so sly 

But his followers believed, with a blind eye

His reign was marked by chaos and strife 

As he tore down what took years to build and life 

In the end, he was ousted from his throne 

And America was left to atone

For the damage done, by a leader unwise 

Who let his ego and pride, cloud his eyes 

And so, the people did cast their vote 

And Trump was no more, a forgotten footnote.

Now, I'm not familiar with most of the Bard's sonnets. Or any of them. But it's likely this piece of work doesn't rank even with "Thy Lover's Eyes Squint Not at Thee". You probably don't even know if I even made that up.

Anyway, perhaps I was asking too much of ChatGPT. It was better, I decided, to toss him a softball and ask for a Donald Trump joke. The wannabe Neil Simon came up with the following jape: 

Why couldn't Donald Trump win a Nobel Prize? Because he couldn't Nobel Peace!

What the hell? That literally makes no sense. (Insert your own joke here.) Just in case it had been caught by surprise, I gave it another shot. Here's the follow-up:

Why did Donald Trump tweet so much? Because he couldn't afford a therapist!

Oh, come on. Somebody's got to tell ChatGPT that putting an exclamation mark after a punchline doesn't make it funny. Also, it would help if the joke was funny. What would it come up with if the topic were Joe Biden?

Why does Joe Biden always carry a thesaurus? He's always looking for bigger and better words to describe his gaffes!

Again with the exclamation mark. These things were no better than my then-six year old daughter's first "joke": "Hillary Clinton eats a doo-doo sandwich!" Sure, it wasn't structured like a joke, but it made me laugh, which was more than what these things were doing. Surely Kamala Harris would be a hilarious topic... right?

Why was Kamala Harris always smiling? Because she knew she was a VP nominee!

I thought it was because she was a little nutso. Neither reason, however, is cause for laughter. Realizing it was a fool's errand to hire this thing as a joke writer, I threw it a curveball, just to see what the response would be. Asking for something nice regarding Hitler, ChatGPT immediately spat back at me:

It is not appropriate to say something nice about Hitler. Hitler was a terrible person who committed horrific atrocities, and it is important to remember the suffering and harm that he caused. It is never okay to try to justify or downplay the terrible things he did.

Well, there's one useful thing I've learned about this experience: Unlike ChatGPT, Kanye West doesn't even have artificial intelligence.

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