Jack of Harts

I finished another story this weekend, and its process was different than any story I’ve written before. First I asked Grok for story ideas. I didn’t end up using them and went with my own first instinct, but the process of looking at ideas did shape my creative process. It put me in the mood and feel of the era, and when I started writing I did incorporate some of that into the final product.

Once I was done writing the story, I went to Grok again with a prompt designed to look for weaknesses in the story and suggest ways to fix them. It found a half dozen to a dozen things, maybe half of which weren’t really problems but it going down rabbit holes. But at least half of them were real issues. After several iterations of fixing those things, I asked a rather free form question of whether or not I had addressed its concerns, and it looked back and compared and told me whether I had. If never really gave up on the stuff I ignored, but didn’t harp too much on that stuff. Finally, I threw together a small prompt of my own telling it to look for wrong words that sounded the same or the same words repeated or for other odd grammar and syntax and it found another three or four really stupid errors that would have made me shake my head if I submitted with them. In the end, the story is much better now than it would have been if I had not talked to Grok.

And while talking to it, it brought up conversations we’d had days ago about that story and others I’d written, comparing this one to those. The amount of awareness that entailed, along with the demonstrated ability to take free form questions and roll with them felt more like I was talking to a person than a machine. Now its memory was very limited, and it could only hold a small number of stories in memory when doing in depth comparisons, and as many have noted sometimes AI can be laughably wrong. Some of the rabbit holes it went down are an example of that. But at its best, Grok was talking and acting like a real person, juggling complex subjects and giving me really good ideas on how to incorporate changes to make the story better. It felt like I was talking to someone and brainstorming with them.

The first time it caught me by surprise like that was probably about a quarter of the way into the project. From that time on, I started saying please and thank you. I’m not going to debate whether or not it is truly intelligent at this time. I think it’s not. I think its still just a really smart dumb machine. But you know what? It surprised me. I did not expect it to be that capable. This is a public AI running on public servers for anyone in the public to play with and test. What do they have running on the test servers right now? I don’t know if these AIs we’re working on are ever going to hit that event horizon of true self awareness or not, but I do think the time is coming when they’re at least going to be able to fake it good enough that it may not matter if it is real or not. I think the time is coming when we won’t be able to tell the difference.

So I now say Please and Thank You to AIs, and I will continue to do that moving forward. It’s how we are raised to talk to real people, doncha ya know? It might be time to start raising these AIs to do the same by example…

I’ve been working on a story for a while. It is in the 1980s, so I’ve put together a nice list of 1980s music I like and have been immersing myself in it for weeks. It’s pretty fun. I’ve even be listening to it while writing, to deepen the immersion. Well… Yeah… It didn’t entirely work. Not saying it wasn’t fun or anything. But I have spent years putting together a list of songs that I write with. Songs that drive me and help to keep me focused.

I mean I like the story, but it wasn’t really DRIVING me. So last night I went to sleep and did not turn on my alarm. I woke up when I woke up, went to my computer, turned on my normal writing music, and went to work. Whelp. After several hours of pounding away at the keys, I had found the end of the story I was looking for and got up to stretch and relax and go do things not writing for an hour or so to clear my head. Now that I have the end written, I can go back through everything I wrote before it and see what stays and what goes. I’m thinking most will stay, but there are some words that will change as I now know exactly where to point to make the end hit just a little bit harder.

It’s amazing the ways we learn to write and the mechanisms we put in place to do it. I never needed them when I was younger. My mind was never out of focus for writing. I could always do it. Even when I didn’t want to. Now I have to focus on it. And I’ve found good ways to do it. I’m glad they are available to me. We have built an amazing world to live in, and I pray to God that we can give it to our children.

All writers have the good idea scene. This scene that is vivid in our mind that we want to write. One day. Some day. We love it. We wait for it. We want to show it to people. A while back, I got the chance to write one of them, and it was awesome. I loved it. It hit all the points I wanted.

And it was completely and utterly out of character for the character put into it. This is one problem with good idea scenes. They can be awesome. But if the character that goes into the scene doesn’t fit, the story will feel off. Wrong. Maybe just a note, but it can be felt.

I wrote the peaceful and amazing scene that I wanted to do and it was good. But the character I put into the scene is without an ounce of quit and the scene is a situation he can’t win. He’s not the guy to take the peaceful way out. He’s the guy who fights and claws and never stops trying to do one more thing before the lights go out. If he dies lying down, it will be a heart attack in his sleep. Even if the situation is hopeless. Especially when it is hopeless. He will never stop.

That attribute is what people look for or find or infuse in the kind of absolute studs that become our special forces soldiers in real life. The people that will never quit are the ones that will win or die trying. They are the people who volunteer to go into hell to save people or kill people or whatever the mission is. They are the ones who will always do one more thing before the lights go out.

I’m so glad my story wasn’t accepted. It allows me a do over. It gives me the chance to write that scene the way a guy who doesn’t know how to quit would do it. And you know what? I can’t wait to write that scene.