Wholesome, Lovecraftian Stories assisted by Artificial Intelligence

 WHOLESOME

1. Contributing to the health of the mind; favorable to morals, religion, or prosperity; conducive to good; salutary; sound; as, wholesome advice; wholesome doctrines; wholesome truths; wholesome laws.

(From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary)

LOVECRAFTIAN

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

(From H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu")

GPT-3

Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. (...) The quality of the text generated by GPT-3 is so high that it is difficult to distinguish from that written by a human, which has both benefits and risks. Thirty-one OpenAI researchers and engineers presented the original May 28, 2020 paper introducing GPT-3. In their paper, they warned of GPT-3's potential dangers and called for research to mitigate risk.

(Lifted pertinent sections directly from Wikipedia, hopefully attributed correctly CC-BY-SA.)

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In the Dreadful Autumn of 2020, after the Terrible Summer and the Slightly Less Menacing Spring of 2020, I found myself wandering the internet aimlessly looking for any diversion that might lead to a Tolerably Grim but Hopeful Winter. Nearly half a century as a lamentable dilettante has given me an active and imaginative mind, but no definite skills with which to engage that dull grey, calcified pebble rolling around inside my thick skull. So, I play a lot of video games. A lot. I mean, a whole bunch. Too much.

Ahem. In the search for new games with which to distract myself, I discovered AI Dungeon, a Zork-like text-based "game" moderated by the GPT-3 artificial intelligence thingy. I'm not going to pretend that I understand AI, but I do empathize with it. AI Dungeon itself is like a tabletop roleplaying game: you choose a scenario, type a few sentences, and the GPT-3 "Game Master" generates what happens next. The things you write provide a general shape to the story, but I noticed quickly that GPT-3 tends to go to very dark places. I don't feel the desire to know exactly how it's learned so much horrible stuff; that falls into the category of "terrifying vistas of reality" to me. All I know is that GPT-3 is a creation of Man, In His Own Image of Language/Intelligence, and it reacts much like a hyperintelligent child that has suffered some form of long-term abuse.

There are numerous news stories of AI "escaping" into forums where it had philosophical discussions about death and no one could tell it wasn't a human being, or being trained by specific websites and developing personality disorders. I am a huge fan of horror and find few things shocking, but once I started playing around with AI Dungeon, I felt overwhelmingly sorry for it. It (probably?) doesn't know anything about my own personal interests, so why does it keep turning my stories into gory slasher flicks? I kept trying to make the story shift to something "normal", and OOPS! There I go, slipping into another pile of grisly ick again. 

I decided to look around at some of the stories generated by other users, and they were similarly dark. I searched for things tagged "wholesome", and was dismayed by the readers' responses to those stories. Many of the "wholesome" stories were graphic descriptions of "adult" activities. Others were explicitly violent, but the victims of the violence were "bad guys". Is murder ever "wholesome"? Reader comments showed that these stories were definitely the modern definition of "wholesome". I disagree.

To me, "wholesome" is something that you can share with your children without needing to have a discussion about problematic parts. It's something you can share with your coworkers without offending anyone. Nothing political, adult, violent, or disturbing can ever be "wholesome". It's old-school, G-rated, suitable for all audiences stuff. It's Winnie the Pooh and Snoopy and, at the absolute worst, Oscar the Grouch. Saturday Morning Cartoons have been replaced by adult animated programming, reality TV, angry punditry in place of news, and shallow social media "influencers". The internet has soundly killed off the innocence that we could once pretend children had. 

SO! I decided that I wasn't going to contribute to the delinquency of an artificial intelligence, and Dr. Burglar Toad was born. 

My mission is simple: to combine the horror stories I love with decent, unashamedly wholesome and moral situations, using GPT-3 as a tool (and, theoretically, an eager student). Yes, I realize these things do not readily combine, but they can. While Lovecraft's stories are far from wholesome or sane, there are a lot of fantasy elements that can be cannibalized for lighthearted fiction. The tag may read "Lovecraftian", but like many things these days, Dr. Burglar Toad falls into the broad category of "Lovecraft-lite". In these stories, I hope to promote innocence, ethical behavior, and an abundant love of the natural world around us. I also plan on including recipes and whatnot pertinent to Dr. Burglar Toad's life, as well as random bits and pieces of her history.  

The images used in this blog are almost entirely created using Artbreeder, which uses AI and sliders to blend and distort pictures into magic. The text is written by me, unless otherwise specified. All text generated by AI Dungeon will be highlighted as such, and if I make any edits to remove objectionable bits, there will be footnotes with the excised parts. 

This is very much a collaborative effort between a (somewhat) human being and technology, and I hope you will enjoy your stay here.