Lately I’ve been fooling around with play.aidungeon.com, particularly its “Dragon” model, which is perhaps based on GPT-3 (though I’m not sure). While the app is biased towards generating second-person adventure game text, I have found it fun to feed it some plot summaries and let it generate a continuation. The results are nonsense, illogical, and inconsistent, but funny.
In regards to story writing, the app can be a lot of fun for generating random ideas, but it’s just about useless (so far as I can tell) for generating appropriately constrained ideas, which are far more important to story writing. Stories, after all, have to go somewhere. Plots develop, characters develop, tensions rise and fall, etc. With only random ideas, the story just kind of meanders around randomly. Perhaps some of its pointless meandering can be tamed with proper prompting, but I have not yet found an effective strategy to achieve this. Perhaps future apps will be better designed for such a purpose, but perhaps it is just an inherent limitation with the AI model itself.
Below are the results of one of my expirements with having the app continue the plot of Jurassic Park. The first three paragraphs are copied from Wikipedia’s plot summary of the film, and the rest is from the AI. You can see that it makes very little sense, and would make a pretty terrible movie, but I found it humorous.
Another experiment involved having it continue the plot of the film Clue, in which Mr. Boddy’s ghost terrorizes the guests and Mrs. Peacock kills Mr. Green with an icicle. In yet another, the AI continued a biography of Mozart by having him get married at age nine and grow up to play pianos in taverns and murder his cousins.
Here’s the Jurassic Park plot continuation (the first three paragraphs are the prompt):
Industrialist John Hammond has created a theme park of cloned dinosaurs, Jurassic Park, on Isla Nublar, a Costa Rican island. After a dinosaur handler is killed by a Velociraptor, the park’s investors, represented by lawyer Donald Gennaro, demand that experts visit the park and certify its safety. Gennaro invites mathematician and chaos theorist Ian Malcolm, while Hammond invites paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant and paleobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler. Upon arrival, the group is shocked to see a live Brachiosaurus.
At the park’s visitor center, the group learns that the cloning was accomplished by extracting dinosaur DNA from mosquitoes preserved in amber. DNA from frogs was used to fill in gaps in the genome of the dinosaurs. To prevent breeding, all the dinosaurs were made female. Malcolm scoffs at the idea, saying that it will inevitably break down. The group witnesses the hatching of a baby Velociraptor and visits the raptor enclosure. During lunch, the group debates the ethics of cloning and the creation of the park, and Malcolm warns about the implications of genetic engineering.
The group is joined by Hammond’s grandchildren, Lex and Tim Murphy, for a tour of the park, while Hammond oversees the tour from the control room. The tour does not go as planned, with most of the dinosaurs failing to appear and the group encountering a sick Triceratops. It is cut short as a tropical storm approaches Isla Nublar. Most of the park employees leave for the mainland on a boat while the visitors return to their electric tour vehicles, except Sattler, who stays behind with the park’s veterinarian to study the Triceratops.
[AI’s continuation]
Meanwhile, Malcolm enters the control room to find that the computer system has been sabotaged. He hacks into the system and finds that Hammond is dead and his son Michael has taken over. As he attempts to escape, he runs afoul of an angry Tyrannosaurus rex who chases him through a tunnel leading out of the building. He returns to his car where he is attacked by two more T-Rexes.
Malcolm manages to drive away, but is pursued by a third T-Rex. A fourth one follows, which knocks him off the road and onto a rocky hillside. He calls out for help and is rescued by Ellie Sattler, who drives up alongside his car and opens fire on the pursuing Tyrannosaurs. She kills them both with her rifle before they can reach Malcolm again.
Back at the visitor center, Malcolm tells Ellie that she saved his life and that he owes her a debt of gratitude. She asks if he wants to come back to the island with her, but he declines. He says there are things here he needs to do first. Meanwhile, Hammond’s grandson Lex has returned from the mainland and reports what happened to his father. While he’s explaining the situation, Hammond notices through a window that one of the rival bioengineers, Ed Regis, is in his proximity.
Hammond rushes out and shoots Regis multiple times before being restrained. He declares that they are at war, before ordering the computer system to be destroyed with a flamethrower.
The film then cuts to the outside of the visitor center, where there is a scream of pain from Ian Malcolm as the building explodes.
The following morning, law enforcement arrives on the island. Gennaro briefs them on the situation. While searching for survivors, they discover that all of the dinosaurs have been killed. The footprints discovered near the visitor center belong to a henchman working for the island’s owner, Peter Ludlow. Ludlow had learned that Hammond was dead and believed that he could get away with claiming the island. He also realized that he was trapped there with several hostile dinosaurs.
The second coup happens in the hospital room where John Hammond lies dying. His granddaughter Kelly has taken over his role as head of InGen and has accelerated the timetable for building a new Jurassic Park in San Diego. However, a police sniper takes her out from a nearby building, mistaking her for Ludlow. The blame shifts to Ludlow. The actual culprit is Ed Regis, who storms the room.
After killing Ludlow with a gunshot to the face, he shouts out that he didn’t kill anyone and that Ian Malcolm was the murderer before escaping via helicopter. With InGen destroyed, Hammond dead, Ludlow dead and Regis on the run, a third shadowy group is suggested as being responsible for the attacks. The investigation suggests that they have no known motive or target.
The book ends with ‘DNA donkeys’, a note about the next entry in the series Tey cats and a reminder that there are fourteen new engravings made out to readers of this book.
