(This is the fourth inquiry experiment this week with Artificial Intelligence for ETMOOC2. The first was a poetry exchange between AI platforms. The second was an Interactive Fiction project with ChatGPT and Twine. The third was generating code for a website about saxophone design).
This was a strange idea that came to me during the week, but I wondered how ChatGPT would do if I asked it to make a Mad Lib-style story (with prompts for words that a reader/player would suggest and fill in before reading the actual story) on the theme of ChatGPT. This concept became a starter point for my inquiry activity.
I actually ended up asking it compose me four different stories — one about The Day In The Life Of ChatGPT. Another is about a conversation between Google’s Bard and ChatGPT (which it wrote, without my prompting, emerged in the style of Shakespearean English — sort of). ChatGPT came up with that title all on its own: A Hilarious Conversation Between Google’s Bard AI And ChatGPT. (Note: the “hilarious” is an oversell, in my opinion). The other two stories involve a day without technology called When Nothing Worked and finally, Walking A Robotic Dog.
You can play the four Mad Libs.
I then reversed course and had ChatGPT play one of its own Mad Libs, asking it via a series of queries for random Parts of Speech words for each of the prompts it had just generated for the story (Such as: give me a random “noun”), plugging those words into the Mad Lib story, and the final result came out predictably strange (but perhaps no stranger than any regular human Mad Lib game).
Process Notes: How I did this experiment was that I took the story generated by ChatGPT with a simple prompt — Make me a Mad Lib style story about … — along with the list of word prompts that were generated by ChatGPT from my query and I moved those over into a Mad Lib generator hosted over at Flippity (which I use with my students). The formatting on the Bard/Chat story dialogue got funky on me and I can’t figure out how to fix it, so it became an odd run-on conversation. I added some character line breaks to help but it still looks mangled to me.
By the way, when I took the same prompts for Mad Lib stories into Google’s Bard, the results were awful and not at all useful. There really is a noticeable difference between the two AI platforms at this point for the kinds of inquiry that I am doing here, where ChatGPT has much more flexibility and creativity built in (or maybe it is more allowed to flourish, likely) than Bard has at this point in time.
Reflections: When we do Parts of Speech in class, we often play and create Mad Libs as a way to play games with language. I suppose ChatGPT could be a collaborator in the story element of these activities, but its sense of humor is only iffy, and what Mad Libs really need is a subversive streak to them. No need to even invite Bard to the party, though. One thing I noticed: The AI was limited in the Parts of Speech it would leave out of the stories. It was all nouns, adjectives and verbs, and that got pretty boring as a reader/player. A human collaborator would have to expand the choices.
Peace (Filling In The Blanks),
Kevin