Reports of My Death Were AI-Generated

Or, How I Realized We Better Think Twice (at least once) About ChatGPT

I’ve been spending some time with Google’s chatGPT-thing, Bard. I gave it an essay prompt I might have assigned during my high-school teaching days, and in seconds it turned out something that I would call a decent C. From some students, a teacher might never see better.

Later, I gave it a prompt I often use with my creative-writing classes, offering the first and last lines of a story and asking students to write their way from one to the other. Again, Bard did pretty good work. 

Then I asked it to rewrite the beginning of the second chapter of my book, Mercury Rising, an alt-history in which Kennedy didn’t die, we made it to the Moon in 1950, and the invading aliens showed up in 1961. Again, fair job, Bard. (It seems rude to critique how well the dog talks; that it speaks at all is reason enough for celebration. To the Slush Pit with you if you believe Bard did it better.)

Bard has no idea what it did. It has devoured the Internet, converted all the letters into numbers, and responded to my prompts based on the probability that the words it reassembles belong together. This allegedly helpful technology will be hell for teachers and shambolic for the careers of people who write informational articles. Someday, it will rewrite “Rossum’s Universal Robots” in the style of William Gibson. I’ve been told that it will spawn new careers in “prompt development,” ideally suited for those who get the most out of their genie’s three wishes and deals with the devil. 

It’s also going to allow us to spread bullshit faster than we’ve ever spread bullshit before. Case in point: I asked Bard to write my obituary.

A lot of writing is formulaic -- The Five-Paragraph Essay, the Inverted Pyramid, the Query Letter, the Hero’s Journey, for examples. Bard took my request, searched for the obit-writing formula, found some shit about “R.W.W. Greene,” and did what I asked it to. (Earlier, I used another AI to come up with a picture of ‘science-fiction writer R.W.W. Greene’ and formatted the whole thing to look like it might have appeared in a newspaper.)

The result looks like an obit, reads like an obit, and confidently sums up the life of the only author named R.W.W. Greene your search engine is likely to find.

Most of it is bunk. Even if I had died yesterday, I would have been 51. I wasn’t born in New Hampshire, nor have I ever attended the University Of. If a celebration of my life is ever held at a church, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. 

The trouble is, some of it is correct. If this showed up in public, a lot of people would buy it and #RIP. If it spread or showed up somewhere credible, it could prove alarming to my distant friends and relatives and a large pain in the ass for me. And it took seconds to write. 

Through no fault of its own, Bard reminds me of disgraced journalist Stephen Glass. 

“I would tell a story, and there would be Fact A, which was true. And there would be Fact B which was partly true and partly fabricated. And then there was Fact C, which was more fabricated and almost no truth. And then Fact D, which was a complete whopper,” Glass told Sixty Minutes in 2003, explaining how he got millions of readers to accept the dozens of fake articles he wrote in the ’90s, damaging the reputations of The New Republic, George, Rolling Stone, Policy Review, and Harper’s, not to mention Vernon Jordan. His stuff was presented as fact, people!! Accepted as the truth…

A million Stephen Glasses at a million typewriters … A billion hoses spewing properly spellt, correctly formatted bullshit …

We got trouble, folks.

Here’s some bonus obit content. 

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THE NEWS: I attended the SFWA Nebulas Conference this past weekend and handed out about fifteen books in hopes of building the buzz for October 2023’s release of Earth Retrograde. I met lots of great people and had many good conversations. 

I think I’m headed for ArmadilloCon in early August and ReaderCon in July. I’d love to see some of you fine people there.

Walk in beauty, 

Rob