Dec 24, 2024
Nov 16,2024
About Once Upon An Algorithm, Ryan says: "A loosely biographical story that wrote itself in an afternoon, this story is about a writer getting into a psychological struggle with a chatbot."
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(Note: Chatbot excerpts were actually written by ChatGPT)
Declan Finnegan didn't like most of what he’d heard about Artificial Intelligence, except the bit about how it might be able to cure some horrible diseases. He was suspicious of it. But now that it had taken over the world so completely, including his world, the world of the writer, he felt that he should at least try it, so he could understand just what kind of beast it was.
He signed into ChatGPT and typed: Write a story, in two thousand words, about a fun night out in Dublin.
As his finger hesitated over the Enter key, he felt like he was about to commit a grubby crime against the human spirit. Against himself. Of course he wasn’t going to do anything with it, whatever it turned out to be. He only wanted to see what it was capable of, just once, then he’d trash it, and be done with it forever. But still, it felt like the edge of a slippery slope, like when he’d started smoking again, and swore that this time he’d only have one or two at the end of the week when he was out for a pint, but now he was back to ten a day. He got up and walked in circles around the kitchen, looked out the window at a fat pigeon fluffing itself down in Mrs. Kerry’s yard, then up at the Evening Star glowing soft and alone in the half-dark. He flicked open his cigarette packet and snapped it shut again, then pounced at his computer and hit Enter.
It sprang to life in an instant, without taking a second to give even a little thought to its assignment, as line by quick-fire line, sentences swept across the screen, paragraphs stacked up, one upon the other, and in less than thirty seconds it stamped a final full-stop at the end of exactly two thousand words.
Everything went still again as Declan sat dumbstruck, thinking about all the hours he would put into a story – even a short one. The blood, sweat, and untold hours; the long stretches of staring at the screen and pigeons and empty skies as he struggled to give shape to some shapeless thought – and now this! He didn’t want to read it. What if it was good? What if it was really good? What if it was a cracker of a night out, full of beautifully flawed characters tumbling through the town in a hilariously pimped-up plot.
He went and put the kettle on, sorted some rubber bands by colour, beheld the pigeon once more, then came back and eyed the first line furtively, like he didn’t want it to notice him standing there watching it. Then he began to read.
One fateful night in Dublin, the city known for its lively pubs and vibrant atmosphere, a group of friends embarked on an unforgettable night out. The evening started innocently enough, with plans to enjoy a few pints of Guinness and soak up the local craic. Little did they know that their night would take an unexpected turn into the realm of hilarity and absurdity.
Declan held onto his head and laughed with relief. So far, so terrible. A few pints of Guinness and soak up the craic and fiddle-de-dee and lordy me. He poured hot water into his teacup, then went back for some more.
As the friends gathered at their favorite pub in Temple Bar, the laughter flowed as freely as the drinks as tales were shared and jokes were exchanged. They soon found themselves in the midst of a spirited ceilidh, twirling and stomping to the lively tunes of traditional Irish music.
But what were the tales, and what were the jokes that made the laughter flow so freely! Never had an account of a twirling, stomping good time made Declan feel so much like curling up on the couch and having a nap. But he was enjoying his own playacting at indignation now, knowing in his heart that, so far, he was winning against the stupid chatbot. He scorched his fingertips as he plucked the teabag out of his cup and cursed about it like he always did, then read some more.
After a few hours of frolicsome dancing and revelry, the group ventured daringly back into the bustling streets. As they meandered through the crowded cobblestone lanes, they stumbled upon a lively street performer juggling flaming torches. Inspired by the display of bravado, one of the friends jokingly suggested they try their hand at fire juggling as well.
'Too adjectival.’ Declan heard the voice of his old English teacher, Mister Carline, singling him out for a discourse on the perils of purple prose.
‘If you can’t find the right adjective or adverb, Declan Finnegan, it means either that your vocabulary is still too small, like your tiny little brain, or that the sentence doesn’t require one. A noun likes a good adjective, it’s true – a bold one, a slippery one, or a tender one, and it sometimes even loves one, if it’s just the right one for it, but it can get along perfectly well without one, too. And a verb enjoys walking hand-in-hand with an adverb, briskly, buoyantly, or boundingly, just like Declan and Emily here on their way to the bus, but it’s also more than happy just to sit by itself and look out upon the uncluttered landscapes of your beautiful sentences.’
ChatGPT might have swallowed and digested trillions of texts, Declan thought, from the entirety of human history; from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Austen and Joyce. It might have eaten up more books than a single human could read in ten thousand lifetimes, but it had not yet sat at a desk in Mister Carline’s English class.
He read on.
The friends’ lighthearted dare quickly escalated into a comedic spectacle. As they attempted to juggle the flaming torches, chaos ensued, with torches flying in every direction and narrowly missing unsuspecting bystanders who alternated between gasps of horror and fits of laughter at the spectacle.
Did they now? But it didn’t go unnoticed by Declan that the machine had got the apostrophe for the tricky possessive plural in the right spot. Points for that. And he had to admit that a bunch of friends having a bit too much revelry before trying to juggle fire on a crowded street did have some dramatic potential to it. He could see what the limbless automaton was reaching for. The prose might be awful, but the premise wasn’t so bad. It suddenly occurred to him that the work of the wannabe-writer robot wasn’t unlike the first stories he’d written at school; not unlike his own fiery tale inspired by the Dockery boys at the end of his street who’d got hold of a box of matches and accidently burnt down the family home. Those early stories had some half-decent set ups, he thought, but he hadn’t quite had the wherewithal to nail them then; to get the right words in just the right places.
He heard Mister Carline again – singing this time, ‘Poor old Declan Finnegan, begin again.’
No wonder teachers were so up in arms. There was no way you could hand this AI stuff in to a literary magazine, or as your doctoral dissertation, but for a school assignment, most definitely yes. And no wonder school kids were so keen to knock these out in under a minute and spend the rest of their weekends doing all the fun things. If AI was not even two years old – not even in kindergarten yet – and it was writing like this, then what was coming next, Declan wondered. What would it be like in its graduating year?
Brianna burst into the flat looking like Friday night ready to ignite – her hair a spiky red explosion above her orange jacket and painted face. Declan stopped and smiled up at her. ‘Are you ready to share tales and exchange jokes as the laughter flows out amidst a spirited ceilidh?’ he asked her.
‘What’s all this?’ she replied.
‘It’s my new line of chat.’
‘So you can be single again?’
‘Listen to this. Tell me what you think.’
Amid the chaos, a passing police officer caught sight of the commotion and approached the revellers. However, upon realizing that it was all in good fun, the officer couldn't help but chuckle at the absurdity of the situation. He shook his head in amusement and advised them to find a safer form of entertainment.
‘It sounds like Noddy on a bender,’ Brianna said. ‘What’s it for?’
‘My computer wrote it. ChatGPT.’
‘Why?’
‘I asked it to write a story about a fun night out in Dublin.’
‘Why don’t you pull on your boots, and come and have an actual fun night out in Dublin with me,’ she said. ‘And how do I look, by the way?’
‘You look the bomb, you really do.’
‘Correct.’
‘Can I just read you the last bit?’ Declan said. ‘This thing knows some things. Look, it even has a denouement like in the movies, when the dust settles on all the drama, and life goes back to normal. It’s like it’s gobbled up The Heroes Journey and the three-act play, and all of that stuff.’
‘Bully for it. Go on then.’
And so, the night in Dublin came to a close with memories of laughter, camaraderie, and a healthy dose of absurdity. As they made their way back home, still chuckling…
‘Still chuckling?’
…still chuckling, they knew that this would be a story to be retold for years to come – a night out in Dublin they would never forget.
‘I don’t think the chatbot’s gonna be winning the Booker any time soon, do you,’ Brianna said. ‘How’s your book going? Did you get a bit done today?’
‘A bit, yeah, in fits and starts. Nothing to stop the world in its tracks … I wish I had the same output as ChatGPT – four thousand words a minute.’
‘Wow. Multiplied by eight hours, that’s two hundred and forty thousand. You could write twenty novels a day if you didn’t stop for lunch.’ She shut the lid on his computer, spun him around on his chair, and straddled his lap.
‘I’m glad you’re not a chatbot, Declan Finnegan,’ she said, brushing his hair back with her fingers. ‘If you were I’d have to drop you, do you know that? If you served up wretched prose like that every time I walked in the room I’d have leave you and move to Australia.’
In another version of the story, the one written by the robot, the lovers might have held hands steadfastly as the train rattled boisterously along, and they might have kissed each other fervently or moistly as they crossed the Liffey, because that’s what the aggregated data from a universe of purloined books suggested to the unconscious algorithm that was moulding it into sentences of sorts. They might have chuckled gratuitously at things that weren’t funny at all, and gasped in amazement at the many unremarkable things they passed along the way. But in this story they mostly did a thing as yet unknown to the minds of machines. Some of it they did out loud as they talked about the things they hoped to get from life, and some of it wordlessly as they looked out the window at the world sliding by. It was a thing called dreaming, and it rose up out of the trillions of synapses and neurones that flickered and glowed inside their brains – more of them in each brain than there were stars in the entire swirling mass of a spiral galaxy. And if he was the Milky Way, she was Andromeda, sometimes two million light years apart, but tonight side-by-side as they travelled at the speed of the Dart towards the city lights.
Ryan Delaney is an Irish-Australian currently living in Edinburgh. His short story The Shadows Cast by the Moon won the Hope Prize; his first novel-in-progress was chosen for development at The Stinging Fly Summer School at the Irish Writers Centre; and Franky Unbound, a humorous story about being the youngest in a big family, was shortlisted in the All-Ireland Scholarship. He blogs at johnmerkel01.wordpress.com/writer
