So, I was having a conversation with a friend when I decided to try something. I’ve been rewatching (and sometimes watching for the first time) classic-era Doctor Who serials and blogging about them. My latest effort, as we will discuss, is the Sixth Doctor serial Revelation of the Daleks. I watched it and wrote up my post about it, including screenshots and everything.
But I haven’t published it yet. Instead I asked my friend Dave to feed my blog to his favorite AI and ask it to generate a post about the story in my style. I made sure to make sure my post was finished before I read the results.
He ended up creating two posts, one using ChatGPT and one using another AI called Perplexity.
Actually he did three, because the after the first ChatGPT one he got the AI to admit it hadn’t actually read my blog, it just wrote up something a Doctor Who blogger might. So he fed it my post on The Well specifically to get a new result, which was quite similar to its first effort, but had some differences.
Anyway, none of the posts completely copied the format I normally use so actually comparing them would make it pretty obvious which one was mine. So just for funsies, I’ll link the text of each one here, in random order and if you are interested you can try to figure out which one is mine. For my post, I’m only including my “main” response part, and not all my other notes at when the episode aired or who were the interesting guest stars, since the other posts don’t include their version of that stuff.
For clarity, I don’t actually use AI at all in writing this blog, except I guess that Google comes up with AI results when I’m searching something for research purposes. So what you read here is 100% me unless it says otherwise, and these two AI posts are 100% not me except to the degree that the AI has mined what I wrote for its own efforts.
Have a look, if you wish, and see what you think.
Version 1
Version 2
Version 3
What do you think? For me it seems obvious, but clearly that depends on being aware of how I tackle these things. Certainly there are ways that the AI writing is smoother than mine, with less babbling. But to my ears, anyway, they don’t sound like me.
Anyway, the answer is below these images…
So, if it’s not clear, it’s #3 that is my actual writing. #1 was Perplexity and #2 was the ChatGPT version, after having read my comments on The Well.
The fact that #1 is AI is I think pretty obvious, simply because it’s shorter than the others and also because it mentions a few things that have got nothing to do with the episode at all: Graceless Pâté, the twin pilots and the Captain’s arc. Huh?
The ChatGPT also mentions “One character gets her hands crushed to death”, which I’m pretty sure does not happen. There are only three female characters that I remember dying–two get shot by Daleks and the third is stabbed by a pointy blade. And I’m not even sure what “having your hands crushed to death” even means.
Both AI’s focus on an element of the script that I only mention flippantly, which is the sort of corporate satire side of things–the fact that the not-quite-dead people of Tranquil Repose are being sold off as food. According to both AIs, this was the main point of the serial. Personally, I’d say that maybe the writers wanted that to be the main point, or at least a main point, but in the final product that theme is largely crowded by al the other busyness of the story.
But ultimately I think the most telling difference between my article and the others is that they both sound like they are trying to be proper reviews, while what I tend to write is more along the lines of a personal response. Though we might identify some of the same points (and maybe the AI will bring up things that I forgot) I usually navigate toward how I felt about it the story and why, and what interesting things did I notice and so on. For whatever reason–maybe insecurity, maybe because it’s easier, I don’t know–that’s where I usually spend my time, rather than an objective take on the production’s merits.
So what do we learn from this? Probably nothing, except that even if ChatGPT can generate an article quickly, and even if it could trick someone into thinking it was me, it won’t say what I actually want to say. So if I want to express my actual thoughts and not just generate content, I’ll just have to go the long way around.
I’ll put up my proper Revelation of the Daleks post, complete with full formatting, extra thoughts and screen captures and the rest, sometime soon.
PakarPBN
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