Does ChatGPT Have a Whimsy Gap?
ChatGPT has blown my mind and cracked me up many times over the past few weeks. It’s just a dumb chatbot. But it’s the first one I’ve ever toyed with that actually delivers genuinely hilarious results.
I’ve documented a few examples on my recent article for Jokes Review: ChatGPT Is Hilarious.
Yet many people are already bored to death by it. For example, Erik Hoel writes in his post The Banality of ChatGPT: “There was never a time talking to it when I wasn’t bored. The only exception was asking it to translate what it had said into poetry, but this also wore thin after the third example of what was really just mediocre rhymes.”
I hate to state the obvious, but this is a simple case of “garbage in, garbage out.” If the most interesting thing you can think to do with ChatGPT is to write poetry…then you deserve to be bored.
But I am intrigued by a critique raised by Alyssa Rosenberg on Andrew Sullivan’s podcast. She noted that AI chatbots suffer from a “whimsy gap.” That is, chatbots can be entertaining, informative, and maybe even creative, but they can’t seem to pull off whimsy. Here’s Rosenberg, lightly edited for clarity:
I’ve been asking ChatGPT to tell me stories and giving it the basic contours of great children’s literature. Where the Wild Things Are. Harry Potter. A Bargain for Frances. But the stories are terrible, right? They’re all these sort of incredibly moralistic little golden stories.
This critique (like many others) expects too much from a chatbot. Virtually all human authors would fail a whimsy test. It’s hard to be truly whimsical—especially in a sustained way over the course of a story. And even when you can pull off true whimsy, it can be a surefire recipe for failure. This is why Hollywood films invariably stick to familiar characters and formulaic story arcs.
Dreams are whimsical. Pataphysics, my pet literary trope, is whimsical. Fiction prose can be whimsical in the right hands (for instance, the prose of Lolita, Nabokov’s first book written in English, his third language, is unusual in word choice and sentence structure to the point of being whimsical from sentence to sentence). But generally, whimsy is pretty hard to come by.
I’m not even convinced that most children’s literature is terribly whimsical. I recently skimmed The Phantom Tollbooth, a favorite of mine as a kid. I was immediately struck by how formulaic the plot was. Far from the freewheeling adventure story I’d remembered, I found a book that established a simple pattern in the first chapter and then repeated it chapter after chapter for the length of the book.
Consider that, as a writer, the first thing you do in a story is lay down plot and style parameters. By the time your first paragraph is written, you’re already locked into certain rules in terms of voice and tone, sentence structure, etc. Once you have a character, there are only so many character arcs you can take them on. They’ve all been mapped out.
A story is a world. To be coherent, a world has to have rules. This tends to shut out whimsy from most stories, since it’s antagonistic to other key plot and style elements. Particularly if you’re a screenwriter, where each page you write costs money to produce. If you want to begin act three on page 75 so you can wrap up the story at page 95, then you can’t afford to be spend much time casually inventing new characters with their own fanciful storylines.
Then again, whimsy itself can be a parameter of a story, and can in some cases be effectively incorporated into stories (Alice in Wonderland, Gargantua and Pantagruel…). So, presumably, ChatGPT could be trained to beat even Lewis Carroll at the whimsy game.
Honestly, I’m still impressed by the fact that at chatbot can make me laugh. With a little bit of whimsy in the prompt (and less poetry!), you can get some legitimately funny results. Here’s one example pulled from my Jokes Review article linked above.
Prompt: “Write an advertisement for women's lingerie in the voice of a pirate.”
Ahoy mateys! Are ye lookin' to add some spice to yer love life? Look no further than our fine selection of women's lingerie! From sultry lace corsets to daring fishnet teddies, we've got it all to set yer heart a-racin' and yer partner swoonin'. And with our unbeatable prices, ye won't have to plunder yer treasure chest to afford it. So don't be a scallywag, visit our shop today and find the perfect lingerie to make yer nights on the high seas that much more thrilling. Arrrr!
This, in my view, is pretty damn funny. If this isn’t a snippet that could be used toward building a whimsical story, I don’t know what is. But notice: the truly clever part, really, is the prompt. Almost any way the chatbot went with this, the results were bound to be at least somewhat humorous.
In my view, this is where we’re at with AI chatbots, and where we should be at: Chatbots are a tool that can be used to help artists and content creators achieve their larger vision, up to and including building whimsical stories.
Garbage in garbage out. Whimsy in, whimsy out.