April 3, 2023

I have had yet another change of heart.

My previous plan was to only post the finished product, obviously, like any other normal fanfiction. But this never was a normal fanfiction to begin with. At its core, it is a ChatGPT experiment, and what kind of experiment would it be, if I did not record it step by step?

And since I’m already sharing a strange thing with the internet, why not share some stranger things? The more the merrier, I reckoned.

So, netizens of the World Wide Web, it is my pleasure to hereby announce that I have decided to post everything – dumb outlines, unfinished drafts, streams of consciousness, insane brainstorming – that documents the development of this project.

These not-chapters chapters will serve as the lab journal part of this project and precede the actual chapters. Please skip them if you want to avoid spoilers.

The first pages of the lab journal will be filled by musings like this, which were supposed to go into the endnotes section, but obviously they grew too long to fit in there.

My rants will be followed by chaotic drafts of whatever I’m presently working on. When I’m drafting, I go back and forth and jump around, so until the drafts are finished, I will be erratically updating them. Come back and you might find something that wasn’t there the last time you visited.

The lab journal will serve as a memorial for the time I spent trying to write a humongous crack fic, all because I wanted to test how well GPT-4 worked (“Try it, it would be fun,” my brain said). Will it be time wasted or time well-spent? I guess only time will tell.

In the beginning, I wanted nothing more than to feed low-effort prompts to FanficGPT to get it to churn out for me some custom-made stories of an unpopular pairing I randomly took a fancy to. I never imagined I’d end up writing more than FanficGPT does. I was supposed to be the one reading and FanficGPT was supposed to be the one writing, not the opposite.

But to get FanficGPT to give me the kind of story I wanted to read, I had to tell it more and more about how I imagined the characters and the world they inhabited. Then, I was editing a sentence or two, switching a word here and there.

“‘Tis nothing,” I thought, “I won’t need to expend much more effort than this.” Then, I was expanding on the directions I gave FanficGPT and telling it what thoughts and feelings the characters should have.

Then, I found out ChatGPT’s memory is insanely limited, and that I had to provide it with outlines and summaries. But in order to compose outlines and summaries, you need to first have on hand whatever it is that needs to be outlined and summarized.

And before I realized it, I was writing some POV chapters myself, albeit in a sort of way that made them read like a crappy crossbred between a prompt for FanficGPT and a bona fide POV chapter, occasionally with some background information I snatched from news articles crammed in there.

I was doing the exact opposite of what I set out to do, which was to be as lazy as possible. I really turned the table on myself here. Oh well. At least it’s not a bad joke.

So, right now, I am working on an outline and a summary to provide FanficGPT overall direction. These are meant to be full of holes and make insane leaps. Those blanks are supposed to be filled in by FanficGPT, as the goal of this experiment is to see what FanficGPT might come up with, given ample guidance. Well, I would be lying if I failed to mention that I have yet to give up my second goal, which is to read good fanfiction while being as lazy as I possibly can be.

Besides those, I am also working on the initial chapter(s) of the important POV characters, where they will be first introduced to FanficGPT to set the mood and tone. If this is to be a good story, I will have to do this work to establish a firm foundation for FanficGPT to build and expand upon.

On a scale from 0 to 100, with 100 being a human author writing fanfiction on their own, what’s my current level of effort, you ask? “Around 50,” I would have answered, only that is too outrageously close to 100. I suppose I’d better stay with 25, the assessment from the last entry, if I know what’s good for me.

My writing is a bit shit. That is a fact. I’m not a fanfiction writer, and this story began only as a ChatGPT experiment, I don’t plan on lying about those things. I reiterate, this story only came to be because I wanted to experiment with the ways ChatGPT behaves while also having some fun.

The experiment is turning out to be a bit tiring for a lazy bum like me, quite a bit more tiring than I could have imagined.

(I tip my hat to authentic fanfiction writers: You are amazing, and I would like to say on behalf of every reader that we love you! You are appreciated!)

That is not to say the experiment is not fun. Since I am no fanfiction writer, it feels pretty surreal to be doing this. It’s like having an out-of-body experience, just floating around and watching somebody else, not myself, write a fanfiction.

(Well, FanficGPT will hopefully be writing the bulk of it anyway, once I am done with all the prep work. Nevertheless, I retain the right to edit whatever FanficGPT wrote, whenever I feel like it.)

It’s almost like the process of me writing this story with FanficGPT is in and of itself a story, and the fic is a story within a story. If you think about it this way, it’s all rather modern or postmodern, not that I can tell the difference.

Maybe at one point in the future of our timeline, our artificial general intelligence overlord will be reading this and chuckling over the folly of men. On second thought, AGI’s perception of time would probably be quite different from ours, so it might be more precise to say that perhaps, our AGI overlord is reading this and having a chuckle right now.

I hope you find this project as weirdly interesting as I do.