Want a poem in the style of Frank O’Hara or a story in the style of Flannery O’Connor? Your wish is ChatGPT’s command: Just send the request and the words unfurl across your screen. In about thirty seconds, ChatGPT can unleash a 494-word “Flannery O’Connor–style” story about a quiet, plain-looking girl in a small Southern town hurling a Bible at a preacher’s head. A five-stanza “Frank O’Hara–style” poem, rhapsodizing the bustle of music and strangers on city sidewalks, takes ChatGPT less than fifteen seconds to write.
A chatbot created by the San Francisco–based research lab Open AI, ChatGPT was released for use by the general public in November. Although artificial intelligence (AI) has been in development for decades, ChatGPT has struck a cultural nerve—particularly among those who make their living with language. ChatGPT’s learning model was trained on a mind-boggling 570 gigabytes of text, mostly English-language material from various sources and timedemonstrate an understanding of basic narrative structure and different genres while also incorporating customizable details about setting, style, and character.
