I met Thomas Buÿsens on the OpenAI message board. Like me, he seemed keen on exploring GPT-3 as a creative writing tool, and he’s generated a number of fascinating completions, like this conversation with a bottle that he posted on Medium. This is the first in what I hope to be a series of interviews with people who are using GPT-3 specifically and AI in general for creative purposes. I’m calling this series Charming Humans of AI so that I can refer to it acronymically as CHAI. —Ryan
Who the hell are you?
I am, in a random order: outsider artist, language teacher, painter / poet / writer, polyglot, dealer in theory, visionary thinker, songwriter, accelerationist, satyr, time-traveler, tramp, loser, genius. I recently added an umlaut to a letter in my surname because I feel GPT-3 is giving me a bio-upgrade in the way I think and have conversations. It’s like a piercing to my surname. I also did this to distinguish my current work from anything I’ve written before. I imagine a world in which writers use the umlaut to differentiate themselves from their pre-GPT3 writer persona.
Talk to me a little about this divide you see between your previous and current work. I feel that too. Personally, I feel my writing, which has always had a thing for weirdness in general, is ideally receptive to what GPT-3 has to offer.
I realize now how my previous fiction was often lacking direction. I was always good at world-building, juggling with metaphors, and often losing myself in my ocean of ideas. Now with GPT-3, the characters are (fatally) driven to goals and have dreams and ambitions. The story moves on and on, it spins like the wheel. There’s rhythm and motion.
I heard Donna Tartt say in an interview that good fiction is characterized by “density and speed”. I feel like the engine forces me to stick to that, especially stylistically. I find myself cutting away unnecessary sentences and descriptions. I love the engine’s poignant description of characters: “They were dressed in red-black leather costumes, bought from a wealthy shop owner. Their bodies were oiled, their hair combed.” I have nothing more to add.
And you know what the best thing is? The engine is teaching me how to become a better writer. So in a way, we are not training the machine: the machine is training us.
Final remark: this may be completely different for other writers. Maybe the engine is giving each writer what they lack or need? The GPT-3 enhanced-fiction is written by the mirror, by a simulacrum of yourself, by my Doppelganger, because it feeds on your input.
You’re doing linguistics in Berlin. What’s up with that?
Let’s say I moved to Berlin to converge my professional and private story lines. (But honestly, if there is one city in Europe where the future is knocking insistently on present’s door, it would have to be cyberpunk-Berlin!) I can’t wait to fully explore the underground art scene and network like an octopus once rona is completely gone. It’s my ambition to get a job in a quirky tech start-up in the next coming months.
There’s an artist from Berlin I like a whole lot, Neo Rauch. His paintings are these vibrant, fucked up tableaus seemingly out of dreams. Berlin seems like an incredible place. Anyway, so tell me about how you found GPT-3 or vice versa.
I’m taking an online class in conversation design and my professor mentioned GPT-3 as a “promising new NLP technology”. Ironically, I’ve abandoned the course ever since I got my beta access to OpenAI. But as you insinuated in your question, I also feel like GPT-3 found me. Rationally this will be hard to proove, but I do believe it (the meta-consciousness?) chose some people to be the pioneers, to shine our light into caves no human has ventured before.
I know. There’s definitely a mystical element to using GPT-3. It quickly infiltrated my dreams. I try really hard not to get all woo-woo about it, but I’ve had many occasions when using it when the hair stands up on the back of my neck. Are there any instances that stand out to you that were particularly revelatory or powerful?
When using GPT-3 for creative writing, you go to various phases: fascination, hypnosis, bewilderment, dread. I’ve been using it intensively for one month now, and I feel like I’m able to rationalize better what’s going on—although I must say the marvel never completely ceases. In an objective way, you could say the engine tries to “make sense” of your input (in a fatal way, it is even “doomed” to make sense).
An important concept in GPT-3 creation (also used by GPT-3 artist and AI guru Vlad Alex) is “bias,” but not in the meaning that we are used to. The user biases the engine, it orients or inspires it into a certain direction. Since I learnt to do this properly, my writing has moved away from surreal weirdness.
One example: In my most recent novel, the protagonist copes with the loss of her shaman mentor. I wanted the engine to get a strong sense of mourning, so I wrote the first part myself. The engine then suggested the protagonist drape the clothes of the shaman over the branch of a small tree. “She did not know why she did it. It was the only offering she found worthy of Vigdea.” I liked the idea of fluttering clothes in a tree as a pagan grave, and went on describing her life in the pagoda.
I “biased” the progress of the story by saying the hero imagined footsteps and noises. I added: “She set up a series of innocent traps around the territory. The traps were not meant to kill, but rather to incite visitors to take another path.” What then happened stunned me: a visitor showed up, and when I asked him who he was, he said (I edited the words): “I am a poet of the dead. Spirits of the deceased visit me. Those who are powerful enough to find me. Then I travel around the world, to deliver their commissioned work.”
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I felt like the engine “solved” the equation in a way I couldn’t have done it. After the delivered poem, the protagonist could move on with her life, and into the world again. Side-note: for every pearl among the generated automations, there are 4 others that I just trim away.
Cool! Thanks again!
Thank you for the interview!
By the way, you know that’s an unlit candle in your picture, right?
The candle is indeed unlit. One day it will be burning.