I used AI to Write a Trending Short Story. And Here is What I Learned About AI-Human Collaboration

Recently, my colleague at Jumpcut, Winnie Kemp, gave me the following one-line story premise:?A college student agrees to marry a "ghost?bride,", which is the Chinese tradition of marrying off unwed daughters who died in order to relieve them of the shame of being husbandless for eternity. When the dead woman starts terrorizing?her new husband, he must find a way to appease her before it's too late.. The challenge that I took upon myself?was to generate a 3-4K word short story based on this premise under the constraint that I had just a few hours for the writing. I recently posted the story to Reddit and the story has received 58K views and 94% upvotes so far. In this post, I describe how I did it and what the main learnings were.?

Storytelling with ChatGPT: Strengths and Weaknesses

For some time now, I’ve been experimenting with the use of GPT3 (and more recently, ChatGPT) for creative writing. If you ask chatgpt to write short stories, it doesn’t take long to see that chatgpt gets story structure and has good command over language. It can dramatically increase the speed with which one writes. However, the stories it writes lack in two important ways.?

1. Specificity: ChatGPT stories are usually too generic. Often, the best stories are grounded in very specific worlds and that specificity may come from an author’s personal experiences or from events they have witnessed. Chatgpt is unable to replicate that. For example, the original description of the ghost wedding in my story lacked detail; the few details that were included didn’t even fit the description of a Chinese wedding. I had to do some of my own research on ghost weddings to fill in those details (e.g. bride being represented by an effigy made of bamboo and the burning of the effigy at the end of the wedding). Similarly, the description of the nightmares that my main character, Jin, faced were too generic. I had to draw on an experience from my own worst nightmare to bring in some specificity on how harrowing the experience was for Jin. And all endings that ChatGPT suggested were uninteresting for the most part. The ending and the key subplots were mine. But the writing (given the plot details) and editing was all done by ChatGPT.

2. Another limitation of current AI is that the story quality drops significantly as I try to write longer stories. While ChatGPT addresses some of the memory limitations of GPT3 (which struggles to maintain story coherence over thousands of words), high-quality stories of close to 5-10K words are beyond ChatGPT today. Human intervention is needed to maintain story coherence.

How will Generative AI Impact Creative Jobs?

Some of my main takeaways from this experience are:

1. Given my schedule and time constraints, it is unlikely that I could have written this story without ChatGPT’s help. A tool like this will encourage more people to explore their creative interests.?

2. Humans are not going anywhere: Human-AI collaboration is the key to generating *great* content. To be clear, low-end creative tasks are clearly (& unfortunately) up for grabs. But I believe high-end creativity is not under threat and will in fact be enhanced as writers become more productive with generative AI like chatgpt. (Also, readers like to know the story behind the story and that is far more interesting when the story has a human inspiration). So I think it’s best to view ChatGPT as a tool that allows writers to focus on “high-end” tasks (i.e. most value-adding tasks like story structure and plot details versus the nuts & bolts of writing) and can help create better stories as a result.

3. Finally, while computer scientists are doing interesting work on LLMs, there is a huge opportunity for social scientists, HCI, and IS researchers to study how best to design human-AI collaboration (if you are a PhD student with experience with field/lab experiments and are looking for a postdoc or visiting scholar position focused on human-AI collaboration, send me a note). All in all, what an exciting time for human and AI creativity to come together.?

Without further ado, here is the link to my story about the ghost bride. Hope you like it and constructive feedback is always welcome (PS: writing this story gave me the inspiration for what I think is a much more interesting story about ghost brides).

---

Kartik Hosanagar is the founder of?Jumpcut media, a tech-enabled storytelling company, and the John C. Hower Professor at the Wharton School, where he is also a faculty director of?Wharton AI for Business. He is the author of?A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence.