What Influence ChatGPT, AI has had on My Creativity This Year
From "The Perfectionist" to a short side story for A Boy Bathed In Blood, ChatGPT has contributed to a lot of growth in my creative process.
At this point, it's likely you've heard a lot about OpenAI's ChatGPT. The company's artificial intelligence has opened a huge world of opportunity for humans across almost all industries to maximize their time while the bot writes what may often times be the mundane pieces of text that drag the day, or require more time to think than people prefer.
In the last four months alone, working in sales enablement, I've found a continuing increase of salespeople and leaders using ChatGPT to create sales copy, value propositions, and turning long-winded blog posts into short-form win stories to send to prospects. In my personal life (as seen on Instagram), I've used ChatGPT to write out a weekly workout plan as well as a diet that considers my lactose intolerance, my restrictions against beef, pork, and goat, and my work schedule.
I was once a non-believer, but since about February, ChatGPT has honestly contributed to me maximizing my time and abilities across the board.
To be honest, it started out very simply: "Write a blog headline for my website".
Nothing too crazy.
Then within days, I had it writing the course and lesson descriptions for e-learnings that are part of the onboarding that I run for new hires at MNTN.
And then came "The Perfectionist".
I wanted to know how well artificial intelligence could blend with my own creativity. It went something like this:
- Generate a Production checklist for a music video shoot with six female models.
- Generate a credit roll for a music video.
- Generate a Non-Disclosure Agreement for a music video produced by MRVL WRLD and Alex Auguste, specifically for models appearing in the video.
"The Perfectionist" is my first case study in how anyone looking to break through into a new discipline by learning and having hands-on practice with all of the considerations that normal "amateurs" might bypass. Becoming the writer and director of the video was important because it allowed me to understand every role I would need to have on set, not just for this video but future projects.
That's still all on the technical and production sides, though.
There are very small details you can find even in the recent teasers that are key points from a storyboard developed alongside ChatGPT.
When you watch the teaser, there is a whiteboard that reads: "Project Kimberly Urbana". The name itself, Kimberly Urbana, comes from a short poem I wrote many years ago about having a "dream girl" who would only visit me when it was time to write about love and romance. In the treatment for the video, I decided that rather than a dream girl, the first trio of women in the video would be prototypes - artificially manufactured women who were being developed for sale - and ChatGPT ran the rest of the story.
Check it out:
The board in the video also reads a variety of statements that support this bit of a storyline:
"Can they be perfect"
"Mark VII", "Mark XII", and "Mark XXV" are the official credit names of the trio (Janine F., Pam M., and Talia S.) because they would represent different iterations of this so-called prototype, complete with body markings to designate specifications for designing their bodies. Check out how ChatGPT described building and creating human-like models for an AI Prototype.
In one of the earliest treatments for "The Perfectionist", there was an idea of including a Final Girl, who would be referenced as The Phantasm. She was going to represent the ideal or dream girl personified and would be part of the final act of the video. Labelled "Mark XXIII", this is really where the idea to connect the idea of AI and men's dream girls together. This is also how the video may come full circle, too. Even ChatGPT could speak on the ethical concerns involved in developing perfect women and what impact it might have on both men who buy into the idea and real life women who have to compete against them.
By continuing on and on and on through these prompts with ChatGPT, I was able to think about small details that I believe contribute to so much that works for the upcoming video, including a little leg pop; mannerisms of the models, and even certain shots and angles.
From Prompts to Plots
This year marks the two-year anniversary of A Boy Bathed In Blood's release, and I'm currently in process of re-releasing it and continuing Origins24 with the releases of The Man on the Bridge (sequel), The Boy Who Finally Spoke Up, and Strangers' Ears.
If you've read A Boy Bathed In Blood, you recall that it's a story about a young teenager who discovers his ability to travel through time by accessing the Time Path to do so. In this intro story to Sterling John Grace, the boy travels from 1858 to 1957 to visit his future self and see that he lives to 120 years old, becoming one of the most successful doctors in the world and developing research that would lead to the discovery of stem cells in 1905 (they're called RegenCells, short for Regenerator Cells). Unaccepting that in order to create this future, he would have to abandon his mother, Mary Silva, and his grandfather, Pretty Pete, the boy - who is a slave on the Grace Plantation - takes matters and his new-found power into his own hand.
There are questions left unanswered in A Boy Bathed In Blood, though, mainly what exactly happens to Mary Silva and Pretty Pete. While the plot of The Man on the Bridge will answer those questions, I also wanted to go through some ChatGPT prompts that would force me to consider details that are important when writing a time travel story.
So, here's the skinny. I'll also spoil a bit of my own books.
At the end of Bathed In Blood, Sterling John escapes the Grace Estate to the Time Path, leaving behind a burning building. With this decision, he has eliminated the complete history and impact he would have made had he stayed and avoided the events that took place, this means that eventually someone in 1858 would return to the Grace Estate and realize that the Black Graces had an uprising. It may be suitors of the Grace Daughters, or it may even be other Grace family members who were out for the time being.
The real answer is that Mary Silva would be taken away by one of the Grace brothers, who would himself travel through time. It would be his descendants that would instead dive into research and lead to a research company that would eventually make industry and discipline-breaking research. Rather than investing their research into medicine, they invest into war and eventually create a wealth powerhouse that would last the family through the ages. The company is called DRUDGE (The Dynamic Research and Utility Department of Grace Enterprises).
Where did ChatGPT come in to help? By expanding prompts to be delivered like real-world headlines, I was able to create a side story on Mary Silva's whereabouts by presenting it like a series of controversial news story that are released between 1986 and 2007.
All of the following prompts aligned perfectly with the overall plot of the Origins24 Anthology and connect all the characters together. This is by far the most important writing session I've had.
Writing afrosurrealism requires a lot of thought and digging into characters and situations that feel like true contemporary occurences. In the next prompt, I wanted dialogue that sounded and felt like true interviews and situations from real-life characters. Check out DRUDGE's President being interviewed by Barbara Walters on 20/20 in 1999.
I'm not going to lie, after going through about 30+ prompts following this storyline, I scrapped my previous manuscript of The Man on the Bridge and have since started all over with some critical points that formulate a much better storyline that highlights a sense of abandonment, complications with time travel, and a series of events that eventually forces bette character development.
Using AI to Write About Concerns About AI
There's a lot of buzz about AI right now. As I mentioned before, there isn't a single industry right now that isn't impacted by it. From art to Hollywood, artificial intelligence is replacing jobs and creating tension between pay and the ability to create work.
As someone who's literally written a novel about the dangers of artificial intelligence (We Missed A Meeting, believe it or not), I can't help but lean into my own theories about what could potentially go wrong.
There's a harsh reality to it, which is that it's quite honestly too late. Not to sound bleak, or like I'm sounding the Singularity alarm, but at this point I do feel as though life is moving so fast in this post-Pandemic world that we are required to do so much more input without as much down time or thinking time as before. A person working from home may have five hour-long meetings back to back with no breaks and still have action items from each one of those meetings.
Whether it's humanly impossible to do it or not, that professional is held to getting it done. My thinking is that now is the time to use ChatGPT as a cheat code for production where human limits - or just straight up laziness - apply. While human thinking and AI application with ChatGPT isn't quite the cyborgs we thought it would be from movies, I think there's a degree of its use that should play as a cheat code for us to take the easy route when it's necessary.
Prompt that sh*t.
Resumes. Bios. Cover letters. Letters of recommendations. All of those mundane things that you have to sit down and work on but never really actually want to? Yeah, have ChatGPT do it for you.
While I don't like to use the phrase, "those who don't use it will be left behind", I do think it gives a really good impression of innovative thinking for anyone who needs to impress a Vice President, Director, or Manager.
On the other hand, I also wonder why the fear and threat of AI taking over wasn't ever an issue when the takeover was minimized to just burger-flipping and low-wage work. But that's for another day and another We Missed A Meeting.