Since preliminary results found integrating ChatGPT to the creative writing process at least theoretically productive, I turned my sights to the rest of the story. Below is the edited version of the next cutscene. This is the first scene after the player has fought a few enemies, and the unedited version ChatGPT spit out is not worth your time.
As an aside, it is incredibly irritating how the formatting gets all screwed up when I import from Notepad++, but there’s not much I can do.
EDITED VERSIONEscape From Epstein IslandChapter 3: The Professional Fun Police, The Hallway Monitors of the Clownworld Imperium(NOTE: This comes after a few levels of combat.)Up until now the floors had been fairly homogenous. Roughly the same size, and filled with enemies universally baying for her blood, ready to fight to the death. Not so for this area, a sprawling pavillon of activity. A hive of busy bees minding their tasks, paying her little regard.Near Sarah were rows upon rows of computers, each with a husk of humanity sitting at them. In the air the scent of unwashed feet intertwined with cheap body spray, so heavy you could taste it. Cheetos dust coated the area like a gentle covering of diseased snow.Even without glancing at the banner above her head it was clear she had arrived at the Mecca of electronic neoliberalism. All it does is confirm the obvious.REDDIT POWERMOD TRAINING FACILITYShe steps, one foot after another. Slow at first, then with more confidence. She observes. Dozens of future (P)reddit mods undergoing intense training exercises: banning imaginary users, deleting disobedient speech at lightning speed, practicing the ancient art of simply deleting entire threads at random.At the center of the compound stood a giant throne made entirely of gaming chairs, well reinforced at the base so as to support the gargantuan mass of the head powermod. As she moved closer, still unnoticed, one recruit raised his hand.“Excuse me, Xir. If we delete people’s accounts for criticizing trannies and US foreign policy equally, won’t that expose us all as Unit 8200 Hasbara trolls? It seems like it’d be hard to play the censorship off as left wing and not zionist. And won’t that confuse the audience?”The instructor turned to the recruit and gave a gentle chuckle. “My friend, Redditors are the lowest form of life on Earth. They’ll take whatever shit we give them and ask for seconds. It doesn’t need to make any sense that we censor people for ‘hate speech’ because it ostensibly causes harm, and also censor people for debunking Israeli war propaganda, which are lies that exist to perpetuate mass child murder.“In fact, the seemingly capricious incongruity of our censorship regime is not a bug, but a feature. It allows the most obedient and immoral Soyim to demonstrate their value to the system as mid-level apparatchiks, through their seamless navigation through these apparent contradictions.”“So that’s why it’s fine for us to push a totalitarian throughline supporting an imaginary anti-colonial Brown alliance against cisheteronormative white supremacist capitalism, while also cheering on US Military action against the Houthis?”“Not just fine, my child, required. The shabbos must internalize that the most glorious future imaginable is one where a femboy stilletto stomps on the faces of Israel’s enemies, forever.”Sarah drifted further through the room, still ignored, and noticed that the recruits weren’t all (P)Redditors. A few were 4Chan mods. Some for TikTok. Others were Twitter Community Safety Team Members, who were being trained less in censorship, and more on building networks of wrongthinkers for intelligence agencies.“A strange and evil place,” Sarah thought. She had a burning desire to burn the entire place down, going down in a blaze of glory, but it was a pure fantasy. There were simply too many of them, unathletic though they were. And besides, she had a sneaking suspicion that this cheap, popcorn enemy type would be making an appearance on pretty much every floor from here on out, so she’d get to do it all piecemeal, just not at once.With that thought Sarah kept her face neutral, eyes turned down, and walked towards and then through an open portal on the other side of the room. As the green light vanished and her vision came back she was greeted with a more familiar sight. A small square room, with an army of hateful glares.“Ah,” she said, taking out her plasma rifle, “that’s more like it.”
I ended up rewriting every single word that you read above, yet I still think ChatGPT provided at least some value through sketching out the general structure of the scene. However, I wondered if I could use it for the next round of editing. Prompting these things is hard, but perhaps I could prompt it with everything I wrote above, and see if its output is in some way valuable.
I would say the answer is a tepid yes. Doing another manual pass through my own work always produces superior output, regardless of machine learning help, and much of what it output was worthless bloat. However, at the very least it inspired me to change the scene in ways that I think are beneficial. Below is my second pass through the scene.
Sarah moved on before her cover was blown, soon discovering that Reddit wasn’t the only institution represented in the facility. A neighboring department housed moderators from 4chan, TikTok, and Twitter (now X), all gathered beneath a series of motivational posters. The Twitter Community Safety Team Members were trained to allow more speech, in exchange for better documentation of the wrongthinkers, with this info to be passed to intelligence agencies.
“A strange and evil place,” Sarah thought, as she fantasized setting the entire pavilion ablaze. One glance at the picture of Ryan brought her to her senses. Unathletic though they were, the fedorah-wearers were too great in number. And besides, she had a sneaking suspicion that this enemy type would be making an appearance on pretty much every floor from here on out. She’d dose out the payback in monthly installments.With that thought Sarah kept her face neutral, eyes turned down, walked towards and then through an open portal on the other side of the room, and was swallowed up by the blinding, green light. Instantly, the oppressive hum of office work was silenced. The tapping of keyboards fading into nothing.Her vision returned, and with it a familiar sight. Concrete walls, shoddy lighting, and an army of hostile glares.“Ah,” she said, taking out her plasma rifle, “that’s more like it.”
I like the longer, more explicitly malicious version of the chief powermod’s monologue. ChatGPT is artistically and politically incapable of writing any sort of biting political critique, and the monologue was entirely rewritten by me, but I’m not sure I would have come up with that had it not taken the story in that direction. It is at least good as a form of inspiration.
