Act I, Scene I

[Enter three pigs, Jolly, Merry, and Happy]

Jolly: Oh, how fair the morn has broken,
And how sweet the dew on the grass.
We three pigs, no words unspoken,
Shall build our houses that shall last.

Merry: But hark! What threat looms o’er us?
The wolf, who seeks to do us harm.
We must build strong, lest he come nigh us,
And bring upon us his foul alarm.

Happy: Fear not, dear brothers, for I shall go,
And build my house of straw and hay.
With haste, I’ll have it done, and lo!
The wolf shall never come our way.

…

[Enter wolf, snarling and snapping]

Wolf: These pigs, they think themselves so clever,
With their straw and hay, so flimsy, light. 
But I’ll show them, with my cunning, never
Shall they escape my appetite.

–ChatGPT, given the prompt to write The Three Little Pigs in the style of Shakespeare

The other day, after a discussion we were having about the danger the artificially intelligent ChatGPT tool seems to pose for unemployed writers like myself, my wife and I decided to test the robot with a series of prompts to see just how much of a threat it really is.

We weren’t just interested in having a chat with ChatGPT; we wanted to see what ChatGPT could do. What kind of literary stuff was this writing robot made of? After some simple writing exercises, we asked it to write the story of the three little pigs in the style of Shakespeare. You can see some of the result above and the whole mini-play below.

Since November of last year when ChatGPT-4 was let loose, not a day goes by without some reference in the news to AI in general and ChatGPT in particular. We’re learning we’re at the very dawn of a new technological revolution that will have the kind of miraculous/catastrophic impact on work, society and economic relations that agriculture, the printing press, and the steam engine had. The most accurate prediction that can be made about this pending impact is that no one really knows what it will be, but it almost certainly will hit most of us in ways we didn’t foresee. That, of course, doesn’t mean we couldn’t foresee it or that no one did. 

The threat (or promise, depending on how you look at it) of AI has been looming for decades, even before the term “artificial intelligence” was coined by computer scientist John McCarthy in 1956. (I owe some of my facts about AI to the most recent issue of New Scientist.) To help me fall asleep, I sometimes listen to science fiction radio dramas from the early 1950s (Dimension X, X minus 1, 2000 Plus, etc.). I’m amazed at the techno-pessimism that threads through so many of these stories, one of the chief fears being that the machines will develop minds of their own and overpower us hapless humans. Excellent examples are Nightmare, With Folded Hands, and especially A Logic Named Joe, whose prescience (in 1950) about the form AI will take and how it will be used is frighteningly accurate.

I know that I have not taken the threat of AI terribly seriously until recently. I recall trying to read pages of an AI-generated novel in 2018 and finding it not very impressive or interesting, even as a work of avant-garde literature. Billed as a “gonzo” homage to Jack Kerouac and the great American road novel by Ross Goodwin, the human who got credit for it, 1 the Road didn’t make much of a splash outside of tech circles, where it was read in awe. Connor Goodwin, writing in BOMB, described the difference in how to read this machine’s book, compared to reading anyone else’s:

…it is not necessary, nor fulfilling, to read this novel closely. It is best skimmed, page after page, like stripes on a highway. Luckily, there is a steady stream of poetic breadcrumbs to keep the reader motivated. 1 the Road is equal parts profound (“Car on the road had been looking into each others [sic] faces, which had to be descended to the police station behind them”), poetic (“A patch of water was still looking for some organization, and his lips were falling in vain, a distant silence. The water is dark and seems to be a container, and the stars are still breaking out”), and always unexpected (open to any page).

The way the novel was written–Goodwin basically turned a Cadillac (bought for him by Google) into a sort of sentient being using a video camera and other sensors (also paid for by Google) that fed data into a computer that had also been fed the texts of literary travelogues like On the Road–made it seem more like an art project than an experiment in authorship. I thought it could be safely ignored, or taken to be a sign of the long distance machines still had to travel before they would be producing anything that could be considered original art.

Well, here we are five years later, and ChatGPT is churning out creative writing exercises that show some kind of “skill.” I know others have been seeing how well ChatGPT can imitate Shakespeare, and they’re getting some bizarre results. Just yesterday, the New York Times published experiments with a “BabyGPT” to demonstrate how it can learn to write like Shakespeare. It’s loaded with mistakes and egregious barbarisms, impressive as its rapid progress seems to be.

The playlet ChatGPT wrote for me is no masterpiece, certainly. It’s on the order of a homework assignment completed by a talented eighth-grader, say, with the help of an older sibling or parent. The language is not beautiful. The meter is relentless as doggerel. And yet…

I’m impressed by that enjambment in the last two lines spoken by the wolf above:

But I’ll show them, with my cunning, never
Shall they escape my appetite.

This is a much relied on tool among professional rhyming poets and lyricists, enabling them to break out of that plodding rhythm to a degree. Rhyming also entails planning. If I use this word at the end of this line, in two lines, I’ll need a word to rhyme with it, and in between, I’ll need words that seem to naturally connect them semantically and syntactically. Not only did ChatGPT accomplish this for the wolf’s soliloquy, it created a whole play, with characters, conflict, and plot, in consistent, metered rhyme, for three acts and with an epilogue. And it did this all in a matter of seconds as we watched. I admit to being a little blown away.

I don’t think anyone can doubt that the machine is the author of this imitation Shakespeare, even if it is hardly more than imitation imitation-Shakespeare. But what does this portend for authorship after ChatGPT-4? We know college students and younger are using it to do their homework. Job seekers are using it to create resumes and cover letters. Even professional writers are beginning to use it to do their jobs, not very successfully for now, but for how long will editors be able to hold off this tide? And how long will publishers be able to resist using AI to author popular novels or self-help books in the style of bestsellers, bypassing human authors entirely? We shall probably find out sooner than we expect or hope to.

And now, without further ado, here is ChatGPT’s Shakespearean Three Little Pigs.

Act I, Scene I

[Enter three pigs, Jolly, Merry, and Happy]

Jolly: Oh, how fair the morn has broken,
And how sweet the dew on the grass.
We three pigs, no words unspoken,
Shall build our houses that shall last.

Merry: But hark! What threat looms o’er us?
The wolf, who seeks to do us harm.
We must build strong, lest he come nigh us,
And bring upon us his foul alarm.

Happy: Fear not, dear brothers, for I shall go,
And build my house of straw and hay.
With haste, I’ll have it done, and lo!
The wolf shall never come our way.

[Exeunt]

Act I, Scene II

[Enter wolf, snarling and snapping]

Wolf: These pigs, they think themselves so clever,
With their straw and hay, so flimsy, light.
But I’ll show them, with my cunning, never
Shall they escape my appetite.

[Exit]

Act II, Scene I

[Enter Merry]

Merry: Oh, how the wind does blow and toss,
And how the wolf does howl and growl.
I fear for Happy, and what his loss
Shall bring upon us, foul and foul.

[Enter Happy, panting and out of breath]

Happy: Oh, brothers, how the wolf did huff,
And puff, and blow my house away.
But fear not, for I have had enough,
And now shall build again, without delay.

[Exeunt]

Act II, Scene II

[Enter wolf, smirking]

Wolf: So, Happy has rebuilt his house,
But still, he thinks himself so wise.
But I’ll show him, with my sneaky grouse,
That pigs should know their place and size.

[Exit]

Act III, Scene I

[Enter Jolly]

Jolly: Oh, brothers, we must stick together,
And build our houses strong and true.
For if we do not, we shall sever,
And fall to the wolf, black and blue.

[Enter Happy, beaming with pride]

Happy: Oh, Jolly, see my new house so fine,
Of brick and mortar, so strong and stout.
The wolf shall never enter this house of mine,
And we shall live without a doubt.

Jolly: But where is Merry, so brave and bold?
And why has he not joined us here?

[Enter wolf, snarling and snapping]

Wolf: Ha! Merry is now my prey,
And soon you two shall meet the same fate.

[Enter Merry, wielding a frying pan]

Merry: Hold, wolf, for I have found a way,
To vanquish thee and seal thy fate.

[Exeunt, with wolf running away and pigs victorious]

Epilogue:

Oh, how the pigs did laugh and sing,
And dance around in merry glee.
For they had triumphed over the wolf king,
And lived in peace and harmony.