ChatGPT as Author - 100 Words or Less: 100 Short Stories Generated by AI

This is a book of very short stories generated by Artificial Intelligence - 100 stories, to be exact, all of which are told in fewer than 100 words. This was an experiment in the creativity of ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a language model AI that is currently being used for a range of writing projects, and part of the conversation is about the creativity, or lack thereof, in the AI process. With that in mind, I created a simple prompt: Write a fictional short story about X in 60 words. The first prompt I used did not include the word fictional, and this created a problem, as sometimes the stories would end up more as reports about the subject rather than anything that might be more appropriately classified as a story.

There are a few things readers might notice in these stories. The majority of the characters have female names. The stories tend to be more gender stereotypical in terms of the prompt word if it involves an occupation or identification (the Truck Driver is male, the story about the Toolbox features a male participant, etc.). Also, the stories, such as they are, are very simple, often without a plot, and more like an observation or a description of mood or emotion. The stories are overwhelmingly positive in tone, as if ChatGPT is drawing from resources like Chicken Soup for the Soul. Even the story with the prompt about the Devil ended up with love and kindness as a conclusion.

The ChatGPT AI did not adhere to the prompt in terms of keeping the stories to 60 words, either exactly (which was my original hope) or even as an upper limit. Hence the title of the book, 100 stories in 100 words or less, as most of the stories ran over 60 words (the average word count across all 100 stories is 73.5, inclusive of titles).

The AI's vocabulary is certainly high school level or above, but the ability to craft a story is definitely lacking. Many stories read as if they are elementary or middle school level at best, albeit with a larger stock of words.

Despite these drawbacks, there are some interesting turns of phrase now and then, and a kind of hopefulness in that the AI defaults to the positive. The AI never generated anything that was completely unusable in terms of stories, but there are a few that were discarded because they sounded too much like history reports if the prompt was about a specific person. For example, the story with the prompt of Einstein seems more like a brief fictional description; the story on Abraham Lincoln is a little more toward reporting, and choosing more obscure figures like James K. Polk (a piece generated not included here) was more like a summary of a Wikipedia page.

It was an interesting process, and my selection of prompts here has no particular order or grand plan in mind. This is more of a simple exercise than anything else, hoping to show some of the creativity as well as the creative limits of the ChatGPT AI as it currently functions.