Benny the Blue Whale: A Descent into Story, Language and the Madness of ChatGPT

Children’s author Andy Stanton attempts to explore the potential ability of ChatGPT to take over the human literary realm. The haunting question is whether this new machine intelligence can and will replace human creativity. For this purpose, the AI machine is challenged to apply its algorithms, by following the author’s prompts, to create a story about a blue whale with a tiny penis. The image of the suggested topic serves to reflect the author’s comic side, this humor also infects his commentaries.

As the machine generates a rather long and childish account following these cues, each new section is critically analyzed by the author. The generated story is somewhat childish, rather boring, and lacking emotion. All these aspects are examined and contrasted with accepted literary conventions in human storytelling. Flaws, imperfections, questions of bias and censorship with the bots are examined.

ChatGPT is still in its infancy, many of the problems raised here will probably, with time, be resolved. Unfortunately, while the advent of AI into our culture sparks many questionable fears, the overdrawn, somewhat rambling footnotes and commentary provide a tiresome read.