Eureka. I’ve figured out how I want to use GPT-3 as a writing tool. I’m less interested in AI as a way to eliminate process than as an opportunity to develop a new process. I wrote today’s story by submitting a prompt, producing a completion, revising the completion, resubmitting, introducing more text, editing the subsequent completion, and repeating. After a few rounds of this, when the story reached what seemed like a natural end point, I revised it again, removed the initial prompt, and gave it a title. Here’s the result. —Ryan
Those Involved Most Directly in the Deepest Conspiracies, by Ryan Boudinot
Theodore Rosewood spat into his napkin. "I've had it," he said, "I've totally reached my limit. I'm not eating this artificial human flesh any longer. It's frankly beneath me. I didn't attend two years at the Boise School of Culinary Arts slaving over croissants to be dicing human spam for toothless rubes who wouldn't know the difference."
"We've got dinner rush in an hour," said Mika, "Snap out of it, boss."
Celebrity chef Theodore Rosewood had poured his soul into his restaurant, Tender Vittles. The restaurant's hostess, Mikazuki Nishimura (ミカヅキ) (or simply Mika) was an intelligent high school student. She had shoulder-length black hair which she often tied back in a ponytail with an elastic band of the same color. Her most striking features were her large round glasses that accentuated deep brown eyes flecked with gold.
"She has this irresistible way about herself," said one of Theodore's acquaintances at Tender Vittles, "like Julia Childs crossed with Erma Bombeck."
Little did Theodore know that Mika was actually under cover, and was, in fact, a time-traveling, teenage detective.
When she had first started following him, Mika had been puzzled by her quarry's sudden killing sprees. What motive could he have? Nobody even noticed that the victims were missing until they turned up in Tender Vittles on a dinner plate.
After a few days of being pursued by Mika, Theodore went through with his plans to kill the first customer who ate the human flesh he harvested from the alleys of Portland. The customer turned out to be a police officer, but Theodore didn't care. He was about to kill a second one when Mika stepped in and saved her life.
Since his restaurant's reputation would have been ruined if word got around that he served people (he wanted it known only as prime human flesh), Rosewood set off for Japan, where nobody knew him at all. Mika followed him there and cornered him inside an abandoned warehouse near Osaka International Airport. The final confrontation between them resulted in both Theodore and Mika having their eyes torn out by feral cat-girl assassins named Chiiko & Tamaki.
Afterwards, Mika told Theodore that he could still make the best restaurant in Portland even if he didn't serve prime human flesh. She also said she had the ability to restore their eyesight with cybernetic implants if he would join her on her time-traveling adventures throughout history as Japan's greatest gourmet detective. Theodore was so impressed with her offer that he eventually accepted it.
Theodore and Mikazuki first travel back to the Sengoku period, where they encountered samurai warriors who had sworn allegiance to Hideyoshi Toyotomi. They also encountered ninja assassins like Hattori Hanzo (the best), Kato Danjuro (a close second) & Sekiguchi Sanpei (third-best).
One of the most interesting incidents during their adventures in Feudal Japan was when they tried to investigate whether alcoholic beverages were available. It turns out that sake (a rice wine) had already been invented, but it wasn't actually made with alcohol at all; instead, drinkers were given glasses filled halfway up with warm water in which floated a cube-shaped tablet containing kōji mold spores and another powder known as 乾杯 kanpai (literally "dry cup"). These tablets would cause fermentation within minutes after being dropped into the liquid due to naturally occurring enzymes interacting with both sugars & yeast cultures contained inside each packet. This process gave rise to lactic acid, ethanol...and vinegar!
Another major incident in Feudal Japan involved Theodore breaking up an illicit heroin operation being run by Yamada Nagasunehiko. This led to him being awarded with a visit from Edo's shogunate ruler Tokugawa Ieyasu himself! A meeting was arranged between Mika & her new friend Daimyo Itakura Katsushige where she provided his lordship with DMT and magic mushrooms grown near Nara.
After that, Theodore and Mikazuki traveled to St. Paul, Minnesota in 1973, where they met popular author & social critic Aldous Huxley, who told them that if they ever wanted to experience real psychedelics like mescaline or peyote, then all they had to do was show up on his doorstep anytime before 6:00 PM and ask him politely for any drug he happened to be carrying with him at the time!
Later on, they saw a massive crowd outside an auditorium where Frank Zappa was giving a concert, so Mika rushed inside only to discover it wasn't actually "Frank" but rather one of many impersonators whose main goal in life seemed to be getting laid as often as possible and showing off war wounds that would never heal due to mechanical difficulties incurred during years spent fighting covert wars against both extraterrestrials & rogue members of Earth's military-industrial complex.
Somehow, Theodore had gone from being a murderous foodie in one America's hottest culinary scenes to becoming the time-traveling sidekick of a brilliant investigator. It was then that Mika realized how much she loved him, but her true feelings went unspoken.
Then Mika discovered Mikazuki Station (ミカヅキ駅), a metaphysical location where she met various deities who kept her supplied with all kinds of useful items & weaponry. One day, they provided her with several jars containing deadly bacteria more powerful than even Anthrax or Ebola. This allowed Theodore and Mikazuki to travel back into history yet again!
They went forward thousands of years, past the dawning days of Ancient Rome up until our present time when no one really knows what's going on anymore, not even those involved most directly in the deepest conspiracies. Not including you, either, because by now there should be absolutely no reason for me to still be here, right? Oh well, I guess it doesn't matter anyway since every second wasted thinking about things like plot holes at least guarantees another thousand people will die from gunshots, drug overdoses, or getting run over by cars & vans somewhere in America, which may as well already have been wiped completely clean from existence after everything ended long ago, without anyone ever knowing anything except how much better their lives had become only seconds before, realizing how bad life truly was now that nothing made any sense whatsoever. So don't bother trying to figure out what happened during your last few hours alive cuz nobody cared--especially me, okay?! Goodbye now.