I was scrolling through the Word Press Reader a few days ago (a compilation of blogs I follow) and I spotted a photo which didn’t quite look real. Curious, I opened the post titled “My Parents at My Age” by Robert James.

It was a thoughtful piece about where the author’s parents’ lives were at, at his current age of 52. But it was that image which drew my attention. Why?

At the end, he wrote:

“Hey AI Thing, generate an image of a Jedi Knight visiting his parents.” And voila, a fantasy image was born. I do not know why he threw in “Jedi Knight” to complete his vision, but hey, it’s his story.

Suddenly, I wanted to try it. As a complete neophyte in this strange world, I didn’t know that certain programs only generate words, while others generate images. So, I naively downloaded the program ChatGPT for an image. (In my defense, GPT could stand for “great photos too.”)

Created by Microsoft and OpenAI, which is the primary U.S. based organization for artificial intelligence research, I knew I had found the real deal. That irony does not escape me.

So, I typed in:

“Paint a picture of a young girl with a turbulent childhood who still loves to laugh and write.”

This prompt may sound familiar given the memoir content on this blog. Yes, I was curious with where it would go with “my” information. I did not want to enhance a submitted photo, or give it descriptive clues. The result was going to be pretty generic.

Suddenly, words poured out instead, shooting left to right at breakneck speed. ChatGPT had just written a story. What?

“Ahhh” I realized. Yoda’s words “Much to learn, you still have” quickly sprang to mind. There are apps for generating letters and stories and resumes, and there are apps for images. Got it. I had to slow down a little.

Well, I had a story in front of me, so I read it.

“In the quiet solitude of her sanctuary, there resides a young girl whose soul is both scarred and adorned by the tumultuous chapters of her past. Her name is Emily. In the portrait of her life, strokes of turmoil and chaos intertwine with strokes of resilience and hope. Emily’s journey, though marked by storms, is illuminated by the unwavering light of her laughter and the gentle cadence of her pen.

On the canvas of her being, one sees a girl with eyes that hold the weight of the world, yet sparkle with the promise of tomorrow. Her gaze, a reflection of the stories etched into her heart, speaks of pain endured and dreams dared.

Amidst the shadows of her past, Emily finds solace in the art of writing. With every stroke of her pen, she transforms her pain into poetry, her tears into tales of triumph. Her words, a tapestry woven from the threads of her experiences, resonate with raw emotion and unyielding hope.

In the colors of her laughter, one finds the vibrant hues of resilience and defiance. Each giggle, a melody that rises above the cacophony of life’s trials, echoes through the corridors of her soul, filling them with warmth and light.

Truthfully, I cut Chat’s last two paragraphs as it was growing repetitive. And although the “story” has no plot and uses way too many descriptive phrases, I noticed a similarity to what I once wrote.

I only used the word “paint,” to kick-start the image I hoped to generate, but it jumped on that word and incorporated art into the language and imagery of the story including “in the portrait of her life, strokes of turmoil and chaos intertwine with strokes of resilience and hope,” and “in the colors of her laughter, one finds the vibrant hues of resilience and defiance.”

Here is a paragraph I wrote last month about my mother’s art background:

“Throughout my mother’s childhood, her height was probably measured standing next to various sizes of finished paintings her parents propped up against walls before being sold. Composition, luminosity, charcoal, shading, brushwork, matting, acrylics were all words my mother lived by. Art would be another character in her everyday world.”

And truthfully? I like that phrase “the colors of her laughter” in Chat’s last paragraph although I laughed out loud at the description of my apparent alter ego’s laughter:

“Each giggle, a melody that rises above the cacophony of life’s trials…”

If I was writing it, I would probably say “her laughter was no soft melody. It was loud, turning heads in restaurants, maybe even shaking water in glasses sometimes. Why? Because laughing came from her very core. It was volcanic.”

I felt the need to finish this exercise. Still wanting that image, I researched free image AI-generators and found PIXLR. I used the same phrase in this program.

“Paint a picture of a young girl with a turbulent childhood who still loves to laugh and write.”

It gave me four choices. I selected this one:

Artificial intelligence is literally in the news everyday now. Open AI has just created Sora, which creates AI videos from text instructions. Royal Caribbean Cruise Line just introduced an AI program to calculate food waste on its ships. The United States Post Office is using it to provide accurate predictions of where a package is, when it’s going to be delivered, and the exact time. 

Ultimately, I think or hope that most writers will stay away from artificial intelligence. Writers write because they have to. There’s an almost overwhelming urge, pushing them towards finding the right words, placing them in a particular order, forming stories as they feel them, as they want others to feel them; in both fiction and non-fiction. If there’s an outside source meddling in that process, what’s the point? It would no longer be your voice.

Maybe I’ll try again in a year and see how much ChatGPT has developed; maybe it will better understand the art of storytelling. Then again, that might be scary to find out.

NOTE: I used ChatGPT to think of a title for this story. Crazy, huh?

Here is Robert’s blog, Inside the Red Head’s Head:

https://robertjames1971.blog/2024/02/13/my-parents-at-my-age/

Here is a link to ChatGPT:

https://chat.openai.com/