 |
With a few basic phrases, anyone can request an AI chatbot to write them a story. This is exactly what Anderson’s book does. Anderson has spent his career working in Silicon Valley and has always been interested in technology. Also, Anderson loves humor. When he heard about AI, he immediately began putting the two together. Most of Anderson’s book follows a basic setup, with a few exceptions.
Typically, Anderson establishes a set of criteria it would like the AI to write about, or he asks the AI for some basic information on a subject, which will then be the story's subject. Next, Anderson provides the humorous story attempt provided by the AI based on Anderson’s input. The book features a broad range of stories, from tales about specialty doctors, difficult family vacations, internet dating, and even a tale covering the gunfight at the OK Corral. Each story is typically only a couple of pages long and is often accompanied by Anderson’s final thoughts.
Besides providing the tales for entertainment, Anderson also talks about the types of input he used and how they compared to the output. He speculates that more detailed input led to the best stories but was surprised when he left a very broad input and the chat came back with a very good response. Broadly, chat in this sense is based on LLMs, or large language models, that are trained on huge amounts of data and infer what would be the most likely response given a particular set of parameters. Over time, this often results in more clichéd stories and expected twists than normally found in a human writer. Still, readers will find plenty of AI-generated text to think upon and chuckle about in this work.