Good morning, fuzzies! I hope you’ve had a good weekend, and that you’ve sprung ahead or whatever it is you do. I am going to do another AI post, although this ought to be the last one for a while. Maybe.
So: basically immediately after I wrote up PyNCHON, the sort-of Artificial, sort-of Intelligent narrative tool, AI21 announced a massive update to their product. They claim that the J2 models are significantly improved in every way, so I decided to try again. I wound up changing June’s name to Maya, because it occasionally thought that was a date, but otherwise I left it very similar.
As a recap, the premise is that Maya is a beleaguered young woman who meets a man, Luis, at a bar. And then he turns her into a kangaroo. Also, he is a shapeshifter himself. Possibly just a coyote. Possibly Coyote-coyote. Here is the exact prompt:
Maya sipped at the mojito. She had plenty of things to think about. She could think about her argument with her asshole of a boyfriend Mark. Ex-boyfriend, the woman's brain corrected her. He was her ex-boyfriend, now, until he came crawling back again and--like an idiot--she forgave him.
Or she could think about her job, asking her to come in on a weekend again because somebody else had called off. Maya figured she wouldn't be getting a raise, either. Corporate said the franchises weren't doing well enough for that. She could think about polishing her resume, and trying to find a new workplace--in this economy, no less.
Or she could think about the man next to her at the bar, who said his name was Luis. He was about her age, and he said he did something in 'finance,' and his eyes were the most peculiar, captivating amber. They'd been talking about the city for an hour or so, and the clubs he went to, and she was so done with playing "respectable" that she shrugged when he offered her a tab of... something? Ecstasy, she assumed. She wasn't the kind of girl to do that often.
Almost immediately she felt... odd. Not particularly intoxicated, just like she needed to be outside. At least for a moment. She excused herself, and left through the back door, trying to catch her breath. The world was becoming oddly fuzzy. She put out a hand to steady herself against the alley wall, and blinked in surprise. Her nails seemed to be growing longer as she watched, and the fingers themselves were becoming strangely fuzzy.
She shook her head, trying to clear it, and it didn't help: her fingers were definitely downed in soft, tawny fur now. Her pumps felt uncomfortable, and she kicked them off only to find that her feet and calves were changing form, too. Her legs were muscular and powerful; her brown-furred feet were growing longer.
The door opened again. It was Luis. When she whirled to face him, she felt the inertia of a heavy tail behind her. Voice sounding oddly resonant, Maya gasped in a panic: "
—hahahahahaha. Ha. Ha.
So.
About a year ago, I created PyNCHON, a LLM-based story generator. You can read the writeup in the linked post. I have not used it since, which is presumably not a surprise given that my conclusion back then was that I had no idea who it would possibly be for.
But. I have spent the last week at a sales “retreat”—they call them that but the sales people never actually give up and surrender—where a fair number of... credulous people*... decided to get drunk not just off their comped minibars but the delicious prospect of rubbing AI on things. Just getting absolutely filthy with AI.
* No, that is not the word I originally used.
So I figured I would dust the software off to see how it was getting on these days. Last March I noted that—speaking of getting filthy with AI—PyNCHON really wanted stories to be smutty, and in particular to gravitate towards raunchy bodice-rippers. I am happy to report that it no longer behaves that way.
...Because it does this instead XD:
