I played with AI today

The other day, my husband shared a link to a little project about human-AI collaboration by this PhD student at a university in Australia. The human is supposed to write two words/ phrases, and then the AI is going to generate the first paragraph of a story that the human can use as a prompt to write something longer. So I played around a bit, and it was quite amusing.

This is where you can play (and contribute to the project if you are so inclined!): https://narrative-device.herokuapp.com/createstory

And here are some of the story snippets I got:

Academia/ future

Academia is a place where young minds can explore all sorts of new ideas. But what happens when these ideas conflict with the current reality? In the future, some students may find that they have to choose between their belief in the future and their career in academia.

Eerily accurate, no?

Washing machine/ blue

Jenna and John finally went out to buy a new washing machine. They were very excited about it, and almost forgot to buy detergent. When they went to the shops, all the blue detergent was sold out, so they had to settle for red detergent.

Blue and red detergent — is this a cleaner version of The Matrix?

Truck driver/ dry tulips

The truck driver parked his truck in the lot and got out to take a look at the tulips. They were so dry he thought they might blow away in the wind.

or

I was a truck driver for a long time and I never really thought about it, but I think I might have a problem.

The pair above was a bit tricky for the AI, who either made little sense (the image of tulips lifted by the wind is pretty, but…), or completely ignored the second term (unless that is actually the problem the driver has?)

Two cats/ Japan

Two cats sat on the porch, watching the world go by. One was white and one was black, and they always seemed to get along. Japan was in the background, always in the background, and it never bothered either cat.

This is, of course, my favourite. The last sentence is a stylistic gem, and it captures feline psychology perfectly. My plan is to finish the sentence in a future post, so stay…posted?