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ChatGPT and creating alternate history

I don’t think it has any utility at present either for writing or research. It could feasibly become useful in the future as a more sophisticated search engine/wiki for factual queries if it was drawing upon a wider base e.g. scanned primary and secondary literature, so long as there were links to the original sources where the writer could corroborate. Basically as an assisted research tool, but as a substitute for creative writing itself? Definitely not.
 
Time Enough said:
James Patterson is the true answer to what happens when chain a bunch of monkeys to typewriters.
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They would have more originality that ChatGPT.

Thanks for all the responds, i hope i did not offend anybody by bringing this subject up, we see it all over the news these days regarding AI, so i wonder what members here toughed about ChatGPT and it creating AH.
 
I've half a mind towards trying to make a partially AI-generated timeline, but that's more in the vein of "can I use AI text generation as part of my idea for a randomly-generated TL" where I take the output and try to cohere it into an actual narrative.
 
Caprice said:
I've half a mind towards trying to make a partially AI-generated timeline, but that's more in the vein of "can I use AI text generation as part of my idea for a randomly-generated TL" where I take the output and try to cohere it into an actual narrative.
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Why would you ever?
 
Caprice said:
I've half a mind towards trying to make a partially AI-generated timeline, but that's more in the vein of "can I use AI text generation as part of my idea for a randomly-generated TL" where I take the output and try to cohere it into an actual narrative.
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A couple of friends off-site have experimented doing stuff like this for admin reports and the likes, their conclusion was that with anything even slightly specific or specialised, you have to tweak and edit the prompts and answers so much to get anything even remotely usable that you might as well write the bloody thing yourself.
 
You’d either need to do some very good prompt engineering, or you’d use it to generate scenarios. With the former, well ChatGPT would just be expanding on what you’ve written (and it would inject some garbage you’d need to filter out), and with the latter, well, doesn’t much of the fun in AH come from making scenarios? Of course from what I’ve tried so far, AI does a very bad job of this, but it will get better - but even then, it would take away from the fun of AH.
 
Japhy said:
That would require there to be any creativity involved
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I am the one providing the creativity; that is in fact the point of the TL, seeing how I use creativity to spin the results of dice rolls or AI generation or whatever I end up doing into a coherent timeline.
 
Callan said:
Taste is subjective but I’m not sure what exactly people get out of AI AH or AI fiction just generally. It’s always extremely bland and the knowledge of where it came from makes it moreso. I don’t think you can have even base-level enjoyment of fiction without some level of human connection - because in my opinion, fiction isn’t real if there isn’t “some human” behind it all. That is very much the magic of fiction, that something in someone’s head became real, that didn’t truly exist before that person thought of it and made their own interpretation of it in whatever medium.

ChatGPT can’t create, and it explicitly doesn’t claim to. All it can do is scavenge the internet and turn all that information into an answer. You’re reading an open-book exam.

If my grandmother had wheels she’d be a bike. I agree, if things were different they’d be different. And I also agree that people will feel differently about fiction when they’re not lied to about it’s provenance.

I dispute the idea that doing TLs and creative writing is purely for our own entertainment and amusement - if that were true, why would anyone post their work in a public forum? Might as well close up everything other than the Pub if that’s the case. It’s deeply insulting to suggest that creative writing is “pretty much purely for our own entertainment and amusement.” I don’t believe you honestly think that.

But if you do, then I understand why you’re so blasé about AI TLs. If that’s what you think AH and creative writing is, then I see why you would think that prompting a computer to regurgitate pre-existing content in a new order based upon all of the internet that is available to it is on a similar level to stuff many people on this very site have poured (quite literally) their hearts and souls into.
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MODERATOR POST

I appreciate that A.I. is a very divisive field which leads to a lot of heated emotion at this time; most of this post is fine, and virulent debate is to be seen as normal and encouraged on this forum, but the last part of this post where you impugn the intent, sincerity and motivations of the person you are arguing with is not considered to be a form of civil behavior in these matters; it creates a chilling effect that necessarily degrades the civil environment. This is not a formal warning, but please avoid taking your arguments to such lengths in the future.

Thank you.
 
I've used ChatGPT to do a few PM Lists, just to see if it can really. It can, but unless it's very well prompted it can't follow a line of reasoning. I also tried to use it to generate a basic excel formula for generating a Election Night scenario - this takes more work but I think it may have utility on the maths side of things. I also have a website I've been playing with for AH that I am designing using ChatGPT to get thecode and again, it's useful.

Long run I think AI could be useful for fanfic where I get the impression there's a market of readers looking for character x talking to character y with a certain formulaic setting. If you watch a TV show and want to read the character in it discussing their trauma after with the person you ship them with, I think AI will be able to do that about a year after it learns to draw hands and eyes properly, provided there's a market and a data set. There's much less of a data set for AH so it's not as feasible. We're left with a fun tool and not much else and even then I find it doesn't come up with anything too spicy because political data is quite tightly controlled. It's not like art where you can generate wild nonsense quite easily.
 
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Sideways said:
Long run I think AI could be useful for fanfic where I get the impression there's a market of readers looking for character x talking to character y with a certain formulaic setting.
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Fanfic writers are already using chatbots to aid them in writing, and other fanfic writers are screaming bloody murder at them about how they are insulting art with their soulless heretical abominable intelligence machines.
 
Bolt451 said:
I don't get the point of using it. It defeats the fun of writing.

Isn't that the point of making AH content?
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Yeah, I agree with this. Thinking about how alternate histories develop is the fun of writing, and has also helped me think about how real-world history has happened.

I've said before that AH straddles the line between fiction writing and historical research to one degree or another, and I wouldn't use an AI for either of those things.
 
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