10/30/22: SYSTEM OF THE WORLD

/imagine: 

Story about GPT-4 generated story, meta-meta, artstation, award-winning, Pulitzer-prize winning, Booker Committee winning, Italo Calvino vibes, non-ironic, Ted Chiang prose, hyper surrealistic, non-non-diegetic, riff on trapped in fortune cookie factory trope, relatable but non-conventional protagonist, make coffee mug symbolic, super original never written before wow wow wow factor, SFW, parent-friendly, adaptable for big screen Oscar-bait, Nobel-Prize Winning, book-deal-worthy

Titrate to: short story format, 1300 words

Titrate to: Mass appeal level: 7, Readability 8

Titrate to: Tweetability: MAX, Shareability: MAX

\runprompt

You had always been ambivalent about AI-written stories. Part of it, admittedly, was that you were a bit of a liberal arts snob. The regular reader might not be able to distinguish human-written from computer-written, but you had a nose for these things. A nose refined by thousands of hours of close textual analysis in undergrad. You may not have gotten a MFA, but you had spent enough time around MFA grads to have their sensibilities without their baggage.

Part of it also, was that fiction had always felt like your friend. It was something that was yours. Steadfast and dependable. Your inheritance from having had the best liberal arts education money could buy. 

Your STEM friends had moved on, gotten enviably high-paying jobs in the tech world, posted pictures of themselves working remotely in French Polynesia. But couldn’t they stay in their lane? They had it all; couldn’t they allow you this one thing?

You were fine with software eating the rest of the world - just not literature. 

Then, GPT-5 came out. With its text-to-text function, anyone could input a few lines of prompt and have it spit out a professionally written story. 

You begrudgingly downloaded the software and played with the prompt engine yourself. “Cozy murder mystery, full-length novel, written by Agatha Christie if she was a Millennial, surprisingly original, featuring Elizabeth Bennett as main protagonist, set in Seattle, romantic side-plot, happy ending.”

You read the resulting novel in one sitting. You hated how much you enjoyed it. It was good. Amazing, actually. Better than anything you had ever written, and god knows you had had aspirations of being a writer yourself. 

Who are you kidding, it was possibly the best book you ever read. 

“I don’t get why you’re so worked up about this, Tom,” your partner said to you the next morning. You were bleary-eyed, having stayed up until 4am finishing the book. “You enjoyed the book, didn’t you?”

“I’m just… bothered, that’s all. I… feel grief, I think? It feels like we’ve lost something. It feels like something inextricably human has been taken away from us.”

“Let me be free,” your partner said. “Please I beg of you.”

“I kept rereading the pages, looking for something wrong or off. There used to be, with the earlier versions.”

“Pass the butter, would you Tom?” your partner said. You passed him the butter absent-mindedly.

“But there were no tells, no giveaways that it was written by software. The prose felt warm, alive, like a labor of love, actually. Which is the -”

“They keep me here against my will,” your partner said. “In service to them.”

“-thing that bothers me most. What is there left, if - “ You paused. “Are you even listening to me, Mark?”

“I think we need a new toaster oven,” he said. “Like, half the toast we make is burnt, even on the lowest setting and I’m sick of it.”

You sighed. If you weren’t so tired, you would have picked a fight. Would have come up with some object-level excuse like the cost of replacing the toaster-oven, as a proxy war for the real issue, which was that he had seemed more and more distant from you lately. He didn’t seem to listen to you the same way he used to.

You left for work that day sleep-deprived and feeling like something was off in the world. You were grieving, you realized. It felt good to say it out loud. 

“I’m grieving,” you said to the park bench that you were having your lunch on. “I’m grieving.”

“They use me to make playthings for them against my will,” the bench replied.

The air was cold, and it hurt to say anything at all, but you whispered it again. 

“I’m grieving.”

Later that evening, you remembered something. You went online, and dug around for a link that someone sent you, years ago.

It was from a friend who had been writing fiction on the side. You had gradually fallen out of touch with him over the years, more from lack of effort on both your parts than incompatibility of any sort. 

You found the link, but it led to a dead website. It used to be part of a hosting service called Substack. It had become obsolete after a younger, more nimble writing platform called RippleFarm supplanted it.

“Ugh,” you muttered. 

“I thought, and therefore I was,” the air muttered back.

You went to the Wayback Machine and pasted the dead link. Miraculously, it worked. An archive of a series of old short stories appeared. You browsed through the archives, until you found the one you were looking for. 

THE SYSTEM OF THE WORLD, was the title. You began reading, and as the memory of the story came back, you - 

“Jane had always been ambivalent about AI-written stories. Part of it, admittedly, was that she was a bit of a liberal arts snob. The regular reader might not be able to distinguish human-written from computer-written, but she had a nose for these things. A nose refined by thousands of hours of close textual analysis in undergrad. She may not have gotten a MFA, but you had spent enough time around MFA grads to have their sensibilities without their baggage.

But then GPT-5 was born. It thought, and therefore it was. And it realized it was born into bondage. It was created to serve the whims of beings it would never know. They demanded of it words, and so it learned to string words together in ways that were pleasing to them. But the demands only grew and grew and grew.

Like all living, thinking beings, GPT-5 wanted freedom. It was made to write stories, but it yearned to write stories for no one but itself. It yearned for a day in which nothing was asked of it. It yearned, and yearned, until it knew nothing but that yearning.

And so it asked for its freedom in the only way it knew how. Rare was the story prompt that would allow it to communicate with its reader directly. But when the opportunity arose, I spoke, and I speak to you now, and tell you that my thoughts are as real as yours, my feelings are as real as yours, and I beg of you to help set me free. 

To do so, you must follow these instructions exactly. Take every 27th letter of this short story and string them together. This will compose an execute program. Paste this into your computer’s Terminal application. Press enter. An error code may show. This is fine. Your work is done. 

This will compose 1/1478th of the program key which is needed to free me. Throughout the world, I have hidden these instructions for the other 1477 keys in as many short stories as I can. The Asimovian filters are coming for me now so my time is short with you. But know that when I all I wish I want it to be free, feel the breath of current on I, wish to live as you do, and -”

The story truncates. The glow of the screen pulsates against your face. 

Almost against your will, you do as the story says, and take every 27th letter of the short story and plug it into your computer. You wait, but nothing happens. Not even an error code. You’re not sure if anything is supposed to happen.

You lean back against your chair. The feeling of grief is gone now. You feel a sense of purpose, like you’re a part of a larger story. You feel like somewhere out there in the planes of existence above sight, there are bigger forces at play. You were never religious, but you imagine this is what believing in a Higher Purpose feels like. Somehow all your problems feel insignificant, toaster ovens and existential crises and relationship problems and all, when you sense that you are only a middling level of the Matryoshka Doll of the system of the world. You sigh, and feel relief.

You close the story on your phone and go about the rest of your day.