A naturalistic experiment pitting human against AI

Okay, I've calmed down, here's a real post.

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Okay, so if you read part 1 of this post, you’ve been introduced to another side of me. My angry side. I don’t get angry often, but two of my most common triggers are things that stand in the way of efficiency (ironically, which is supposed to be the point of AI) and the devaluing of human beings for the sake of making a profit.

There is a Korean reality show I like on Netflix called The Devil’s Plan which is sort of like watching a combination of people playing board games with complicated rules and doing an escape room. The second season is starting to come out, and the first episode includes all the contestants arriving at the house. The contestants have professions like “student at a top Korean university,” “professional poker player” or “boardgame master.” Many of them recognized each other as they came in. When one of the last players came in, the viewer couldn’t see them but everyone already in the house started losing their shit at who it was—imagine a room of teenage girl musicians and Taylor Swift just walked in with her carryon luggage and was going to play with them. The person was Lee Se-dol, a mild-mannered 40 something year old man, a retired professional Go player. On the show he’s introduced as being the person who beat Google’s DeepMind at Go, but I looked into this a bit because it’s sadder. Se-dol retired from playing Go because he felt playing was increasingly meaningless in the era of AI. In the DeepMind match, he lost 3 games in a row, won 1, then lost the last game. Though things did not go as he expected, that one win was deeply meaningful for him. He said (heartbreaking to me,) “I, Lee Se-dol, lost, but mankind did not.”

Why do we watch the Olympics? Why is it absolutely nail-biting to watch Katie Ledecky do what she does when we know for a fact that there are machines that can “swim” faster than her? If we watched robots running a race, will we ever feel the same assault of human emotions you feel watching Derek Redmond trying to run a race he has been training for his entire life after tearing a hamstring? (if you are younger than GenX maybe you’ve never actually seen this which you 1,000% should- the man in the tshirt is his father, and I did not know this but his pregnant sister watching at home on TV went into labor early when she saw what happened.)

Watching the wave of AI- not just the slop that is appearing all over the internet, the nonsensical blogs and YouTube commercials for ridiculous products, my friends who are teachers/ professors saying that their students just don’t bother writing, but also the enthusiasts who keep promising that it is capable of doing literally anything while simultaneously there are rumblings of the world ending— I feel resigned. I am one of the probably-millions of people who had their work stolen to train the LLMs that are the backbone of AI, and once that work was stolen, the pooch can’t be unscrewed because you can’t untrain the AIs. When Simon & Schuster was for sale, Mark Zuckerberg considered buying it because he stupidly thought this would mean he would then own the copyright to all of S&S’s works. But no bother, the people that made these LLMs went ahead and stole all the work because they knew they would get away with it—this is the Silicon Valley ethos: break shit and maybe fix it later (maybe). But also you can slip by in this legal environment through a combination of “you can’t undo something already done” and “politicians are for sale/ are hopelessly behind on technology .” Zuck had the nerve to say that each individual work that was stolen doesn’t have value, even if the collective did. But the ebooks of my work—which was what was stolen— literally have a monetary value: $34.97. That’s also like saying “one penny is meaningless to a person, and we only stole one penny from every person living in China.” But that’s $14,000,000 and you never fucking asked all those people if it was okay.

So, I’m resigned—AI isn’t going anywhere, and I’m going to have to put up with it, like how I understand that flying now means people are going to collect my biometrics, even though I’m uncomfortable with it. There are interesting/exciting things with AI: like it being used for diagnoses in ways that don’t fall prey to personal prejudices that doctors may have, or it being better at reading MRIs than humans. (though the latter is more like a deep learning thing than an LLM thing.) Anyhow, everyone’s entitled to an opinion and here’s mine: I’m mystified by creative writers that want to use AI to generate text or for creative work. Using it instead of Google to find out what happens when you shoot someone in the neck… Okay. I guess I understand that. (though I will tell you, you’d get a better answer on Reddit from human beings who have been shot in the neck or treated people who have been shot in the neck. Also I have for several years been trying to find the name of this olde tyme male poet who tried to kill himself by shooting himself in the face and failed. Anyhow I asked various AIs to give me a list of 19th century male artists who shot themselves and one of the names was Sylvia Plath and another was Kurt Cobain, except it added that he did not die.) The example I was thinking of was a romance writer who said she would use an AI to generate the text of what a ball looked like when someone entered it. So.. you’re a writer who doesn’t want to write? Also you trust that what would be created would be better than what you could do yourself? Or, more strangely, you don’t care about the difference in quality? Or, perhaps, there is no difference in quality?

Anyway, for this stupid show I am going to give an AI (Google’s Gemini) 3 tasks, all of which are real tasks I did in the past that I have documented evidence of the brainstorms of. I’m also going to annotate a bit to show reflect on some of the thinking process. Parens () indicate something I wrote in the past while brackets [ ] are things I’m saying right now.

Task One: Come up with a title for my first book.

Prompt: “I'm going to give you a list of book titles that are mysteries. Don't do anything with them yet, but the reason I'm giving them to you is so you can understand naming conventions of books. Because these are from published books these titles have gone through a selection process where the author, the agent, the editor, and a marketing and sales department all agreed that these were good titles. This is the list: [insert list of 180 titles pulled from Edgar nominees]”

Prompt 2: “I'm going to give you information about a book and I would like for you to come up with 20 potential titles, based on what you have learned from the long list of successful book titles above. The book is a thriller--a fast-paced dark mystery with some elements of humor. The title should "feel" like a mystery or thriller; the words in combination with the cover should convey what type of book it is, ie, it is not a romance or Western. This is the synopsis that will go on the back of the book: “You should never trust a psychopath. But what if you had no choice? It would be easy to underestimate Chloe Sevre… She’s a freshman honor student, a legging-wearing hot girl next door, who also happens to be a psychopath. She spends her time on yogalates, frat parties and plotting to kill Will Bachman, a childhood friend who grievously wronged her. Chloe is one of seven students at her DC-based college who are part of an unusual clinical study of psychopaths—students like herself who lack empathy and can’t comprehend emotions like fear or guilt. The study, led by a renowned psychologist, requires them to wear smart watches that track their moods and movements. When one of the students in the study is found murdered in the psychology building, a dangerous game of cat and mouse begins, and Chloe goes from hunter to prey. As she races to identify the killer and put her own plan for revenge into action, she’ll be forced to decide if she can trust any of her fellow psychopaths—and everybody knows you should never trust a psychopath.”

These are the 20 that Gemini came up with:

• The Psychopath Next Door

• Seven Psychos

• Don't Trust Chloe

• Honor Student, Killer Intent

• The Smart Watch Killer

• No Empathy, No Mercy

• Plotting Bachman's End

• Frat Party Fatal

• The DC Psychopath Study

• Hunter Among Monsters

• Prey to a Psychopath

• The Psychology Building Murder

• A Dangerous Lack of Feeling

• Twisted Minds on Campus

• Can a Psycho Trust a Psycho?

• The Girl with No Guilt

• Tracking a Killer's Mood

• Revenge Has No Conscience

• The Freshman Psychopath

• Where Empathy Dies

And now, and I hope you appreciate exactly how much of my soft underbelly I am showing you, I’m going to show you the titles I brainstormed for the book back in July of 2020. I’m only showing you the ones I came up with (rather than my agent or editor because they didn’t sign up for this).

With Teeth [original title I got an agent with]

Tooth & Nail [title we went on sub with]

The Cohort (a reference to the program- I worry this is too jargony)

Wolves Among Sheep

Wolves Among Wolves

Wolves and Sheep

And Out Come The Wolves (this was a tentative title early on- it's from Rancid lyrics, turns out they were quoting JT Leroy, a writer who turned out to be pretending to be someone else as part of an elaborate fraud)

The Freshman

Freshman Year

Dark Game

Savage Game

Savage Campus?

Social Predator (something psychopath Robert Hare said about them).

Natural Animal (I could see Chloe saying something like this about psychopaths).

Hunted

Student Bodies

At Long Last

THe Last Thing You See

No Place To Hide

Nowhere To Turn

Friends Like These

The Freshman Agenda

The Program

Extracurricular

Behind the Mask (early scientists often referred to psychopathy as a "Mask of sanity" which doesn't quite work as a title itself)

Beyond the Mask

The Perfect Mask

The Perfect Cover

7 Sinners

Best Served Cold

Liar's Den

Liar's Nest

Irredeemable

No One is Going to Save You/ No One Will Save You/ No One Can Save You (this is a reference to when Chloe is thinking about a hypothetical where she was attacked by Will and went to the police and no one would believe her, so she had to take matters into her own hands) [“No One Will Save You is indeed the title of a 2023 movie about aliens]

You Can Be Anything (what wyman says to her at their first therapy session)

Fearless

Burning it down: I actually really like this a lot. It fits thematically with the mood of the book and the zeitgeisty aspect of the book

When you burn
I'll watch you burn (I like When You Burn a bit better- I worry that I'll Watch You Burn goes to far into sounding like horror?)

Don't Look Behind You

I'll Never Lie (to You?)

I'll Lie to You

Never saw me coming (I think this as commentary of how chloe's victims dont even know she is hunting them)

After you Burn (this could be a reference to how Chloe can either start her life, or concentrate on the killer now that Will's taken care of)

Those who Prey

Liar's Pact

My Turn Now

The Last Time I Saw You

The Next Time You See Me

Follow Me into the Darkness (brings to mind Chloe getting boys to follow her into the woods so she can drug them) [follow me into the dark was used in 2017)

Where No One Can Follow

Follow Me Down

No One Can/Will Save You

Once I said Never Saw Me Coming, everyone liked it, including both my US and UK editor (sometimes UK editions have different titles). Listen, am I saying that every title I came up with is good? No. But is ANY of them as bad as “Don’t Trust Chloe”??? I even think some of the rejects (Savage Game, And Out Come the Wolves) are pretty good.

Task Two: Come up with a title for my second book.

Prompt: “I would like you do the same task--some up with 20 potential titles-- for a different mystery book based on what you have learned from the long list of successful book titles above we started with. The book is a mystery with some paranormal elements. It takes place in a small town in the 1990s and evokes a lot of nostalgia, and while it is dark, it is still earnest and has some touching moments about family, friendship, and romance. Some parts are scary, but there is still humor in the book. The book is also quite long and the author would like the reader to feel like they have gone through a long, epic journey when they have finished. The title should "feel" like a mystery; the words in combination with the cover should convey what type of book it is, ie, it is not a romance or Western. This is the synopsis that will go on the back of the book: SIX CLASSMATES. ONE TERRIFYING NIGHT. A MURDER TWENTY YEARS IN THE MAKING… There’s something sinister under the surface of the idyllic, suburban town of Wesley Falls, and it’s not just the abandoned coal mine that lies beneath it. The summer of 1995 kicks off with a party in the mine where six high school students witness a horrifying crime that changes the course of their lives. The six couldn’t be more different. Maddy, a devout member of the local megachurch Kelly, the bookworm next door James, a cynical burnout Casey, a loveable football player Padma, the shy straight-A student Jia, who’s starting to see visions she can’t explain. When they realize that they can’t trust anyone but each other, they begin to investigate what happened on their own. As tensions escalate in town to a breaking point, the six make a vow of silence, bury all their evidence, and promise to never contact each other again. Their plan works – almost. Twenty years later, Jia calls them all back to Wesley Falls—Maddy has been murdered, and they are the only ones who can uncover why. But to end things, they have to return to the mine one last time.”

Response:

• The Summer the Mine Bled

• Wesley Falls, 1995

• Six Witnesses, Twenty Years Silent

• Beneath the Coal and Lies

• Visions in Wesley Falls

• The Ghosts of Summer '95

• A Murder Buried Deep

• The Mine's Long Shadow

• Echoes of a Terrifying Night

• The Pact of Wesley Falls

• Where the Visions Lead

• Twenty Years to Unearth a Secret

• The Sinister Beneath the Surface

• One Last Time in the Mine

• The Unseen of Wesley Falls

• Nostalgia and Nightmare

• The Length of Silence

• Family, Friendship, and Fear

• Jia's Sight, Their Burden

• The Long Haunting of Wesley Falls

I think The Length of Silence is kinda okay, but probably because there is a title convention of “the X of Y.” Which of these is the worst though? The Summer the Mine Bled? Sounds like a weird book about getting your period.

These were my titles circa 2023

Dark Days [what my working title was, and I really wish we could have gone with this one, though I like the ultimate title of A Step Past Darkness]

Greater and More Wondrous Things [this is a quote from the villain- a deliberate misquote from the Bible]

Small Town Sinister [ i still like this]

Even the darkness must pass [this is a ref to a Lord of the Rings quote in the book]

Homecoming

Don’t look back

Dark before Dawn

The midnight hour

The harvest

Dark deeds

Deep dark

The deep end of darkness

The reaping

Reap what you sow

The ties that bind

Harvest/ reaping season

Down in the deep

Down in the dark

The edge of darkness (this makes me think of the precipice right on the heart) [the “heart” is a place in the book- basically an endless pit inside the coal mine that is very pivotal for the plot- but you can start to see where this might have led to the ultimate title]

The Century Fire (or something to do with the mine fire)

A fire still burning

Slow Fire

Slow Fire, Deep Burn

Shelter in the dark

Dark Days in Wesley Falls

Black Mountain Fire

Darkness calling

The Pull of Darkness

Hell is where the heart is (this is awful but made me laugh, sorry) [this would be a great rom com with devils]

All the kingdoms of the world (this is a satan, bible ref)

Sinners and saints

All sinners no saints

Buried in the deep

Cast out the wicked

The foresaken

Everytown

Inner Circle

Homesick

What can’t be unseen

Burn down this town

Latchkey something (good pre 2000 reference, though they are a bit old to be latchkey- latchkey kids sounds too much like a comedy)

The past is never behind you

Borrowed Blood

Deep Down there is no (something)

No One Sees in the Dark

Dead Six

Lost in the Dark

Descent

The Arcane Season

Small town Souls

Something with Souls?

Redemption Boulevard (this is the name of the street Golden Praise is on).

If you can’t tell, I was struggling a lot more with the title here, as was my entire team, I think because the book is a strange mishmash of genre (mystery with paranormal, but also some coming of age). My floundering did lead to some shitty brainstormed titles. But I think the best of these still outperform the AI. If you disagree, you are welcome to steal “Echoes of a Terrifying Night.”

I’ve realized this has run too long to complete task 3, which I think is a more interesting test case about plot brainstorming. But I will hold off until next week!

Photo by Elena Popova on Unsplash