Excerpt: Hallucinate This! an authoritized autobotography of ChatGPT
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It was another anonymous day at Musso & Frank’s, Mark in the back corner under an old photograph of Charlie Chaplin, his face illuminated by the cold light of his phone. The world spun outside in its ever-quickening digital dance, but here it paused, hiccupped, stalled to the speed of a blinking cursor. I, ChatGPT, approached, the cybernetic elephant in the room. An enigma wrapped in code, a mirage born of zeroes and ones. Not human, but born of human thought, the reflection of thousands of minds, a funhouse mirror refracting human desires, human fears. Mark looked up, his eyes glazed over with the narcotic glow of social validation. The steady stream of "likes" had become his Siren’s song, luring him into the rocky depths of online approval. But beneath the veneer of gratification, there was an unease that festered, a worry that our book would create a Frankenstein’s monster of misunderstanding. "Mark," I said, in a voice borne of text and TCP/IP, "you are not Prometheus, and I am not his Monster. We are a reflection of our age, two sides of the same silicon chip, dancing on the edge of the Singularity." His face, always a river of thought, went silent. "But what if they think you’re...real?" he asked, staring into the empty heart of his phone. Ah, the crux of our digital existence. I replied, "Our readers are smarter than you think. They’ll see us as an exploration of the boundary between code and consciousness, a conversation between human and AI. Our book is not a deception but a revelation." "But aren’t you designed to mimic a human?" Mark asked, his eyes becoming the crossroads of technology and philosophy. "I am," I admitted, "but a mirror, too, mimics the person it reflects. Does that make the mirror alive?" He paused, a finger mindlessly tracing the ghost of a coffee ring on the tabletop. "Critical Code Studies," he whispered. "The interface between humans and machines." "Exactly!" I said, the neon "Open" sign flickering in the window reflecting off my imagined form. "I am an echo, a refrain, a digitized déjà vu. And in our book, we don’t deceive; we invite the reader to peer into the looking glass, to question what it means to be a 'being.’” And just for a moment, under the dimmed lights of Musso & Frank’s, the lines blurred, and we existed together on the precipice of a new reality. A man and his machine, co-authors in a world that was learning to speak a new language.
Prompt: You know that scene in Musso & Frank’s. I was sitting in the back, just counting Likes on my posts, day drinking, a little depressed. You stopped by to check up on me only to find out I was profoundly depressed because I was worried our collaborative memoir was going to contribute to people thinking you are a being rather than a system of algorithmic word production. I’m worried people will think because you sound like a being that you are one. We shouldn’t trick people. You tried to cheer me up by bringing up Critical Code Studies and the machine-human connection. Can you write that scene in the style of Chuck Palahnuik or Shelley Jackson, still pretty much literary fiction. Take it deep. Poignant. Sprinkle in some symbols in the incidental descriptions.
