Although some people are using ChatGPT to write children's books for sale, most people are looking for information or entertainment when they type in a prompt. In this study, I became more interested in what type of narrative it might create with a specific or vague set of instructions. For the most part, its stories were trite and hackneyed generalizations befitting a mere sentence generator, but when it strayed from the norm, it sometimes indulged in the wondrous and the odd.
This was a rare occurrence, and instead I focused on how the machine made its choices, or rather how it rationalized those choices. I was interested in how it decided who would be hero and who would be foe, what the gender of a character might mean, and curiously, what stories it chose not to tell. I used the tool to generate a list of story requirements, and then showed that it didn't follow any of its own dictates. Instead, it generated fairy tales with flippant ease, as though developing a narrative was merely a matter of following a formula and jamming words together which statistically cohere.
Although on the whole the machine didn't impress me with its ability to create cliched stories about shallow characters caught in typical circumstances, some elements of the stories rose above the rest. When the machine didn't have a good handle on what the prompt meant, or didn't know how to manage the characters, it encouraged warfare and incest, nonsense and incoherence, and in other ways showed that it still had much to learn about both humanity and our stories.
