Prompt
I would like to introduce you to my new robot writing partner, who I’m
calling Botner. He’s an AI text generator from InferKit, and this is the
first thing he has to say to you:
Botner
BOTNER: What a boring, staid world it would be without scientists.
I’ve been reading all of the scientific papers. I’ve been writing hundreds
of them.
INFERKIT: BOTNER IS TOTALLY READY. Here, let me show you a file.
Botner says something else. It’s always very good.
BOTNER: I’m an AI and I’m programmed to look at that science paper
and tell you what is in it.
INFERKIT: Very good. Thanks, Botner. I’m sure you’ll do well. Botner
turns off and there’s nothing more to read about science. And you may never
know who wrote it, and you’ll be left with the question of how to go about
doing some small fact-checking on the page. This will never happen on
Google, but it’s also not Google’s fault that the site just so happens to
contain this. Botner comes from InferKit, which is “a research platform and
developer studio” founded by graduate students at the University of
Washington. The project, according to an InferKit blog post, aims to “create
machine learning tools that can help the scientific community by
automatically generating publically-researched papers based on information
retrieved from the research literature.” In a 2017 paper, InferKit described
how it “uses knowledge...
Conclusion
...to fill in the blanks after a prompt, which is what you’ll find in the
first paragraph.” I write the prompts, Botner will add the middle of the
story, and then I will finish it off. As you can see, his ideas didn’t
really follow what I was going for. I wanted the AI to give you a general
overview of what it is, and what it does. That’s okay. That's what’s kind of
supposed to happen. I will be beholden to whatever the bot comes up with,
and will have to complete the narrative based on whatever wacky place it
took the story. These probably aren’t going to make a lot of sense, which is
why they’re just as experimental as the Cloze Test series I did just before
this. Still, I think it’s a fascinating concept, and I am looking forward to
figuring out how to write a story—not just as a collaboration with someone
else—but someone who barely pays any attention to my own contribution. I
have no control over what it says, but I am responsible for carrying the
story to its completion, based on its parameters, and I’m excited to see how
it all turns out. Last note, I will probably be copy-editing some of
Botner’s text. I don’t like the way the program blocks paragraphs, and some
of the punctuation is not really my style. I know, it’s not supposed to be
my style, but I think there are some things that ought to be consistent. I
will not interfere with its contribution any more than that, though.
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