Weekend Freewrite by an AI: What do you think?

Do you think computers will ever be able to write creatively? I hadn't thought of the question before, not really. But tonight my son came in and showed me a website he found called Talk to Transformer. You simply enter a word, phrase or sentence and click "Complete". The algorithms behind the scene then create text by choosing one word at a time in order. I only just learned of it so don't ask me to explain it all technically.

He showed me the results he got which read ok, though not perfectly. It made me question how it was made though since it felt to me like something from a spinner. So I decided to give it a try. What better way to see it's abilities than to have it do a freewrite using the prompt? Of course it finished in about 5 ms rather than 5 minutes but I went with it anyway.

Since it's the weekend and choose-your-own-prompt day I went with "a red scarf" (You can find the prompts at @mariannewest's account). It's a prompt I wrote with last year during the selfie freewrite contest. I typed "a red scarf" into the box and the result is...humorous. Take a look and see:

a red scarf, in the shape of two hearts. A black skirt, in the shape of a crown, hangs over her shoulders. Then she's back to her regular clothes from the last movie.

Kissing is the name for the act, but kissing also has its own catch phrase, which was used in that film as well. This one, "Love in general," was taken from the scene of a couple, Kiss and me, on the beach. When the beach starts to get crowded, she says, "I won't kiss you because you're on the other side of the wall," but she smiles a little cheekily when my husband says, "I bet you're kissing me there too," and they embrace. She laughs and smiles in return and then she kisses him on the cheek.

I guess the line comes from the couple in the movie kissing, of course. But I did a lot in that movie. I also kissed her a lot. She wanted a kiss, obviously. My lips are very thin and it was really painful to have to put myself in the situation where she said: "You're kissing me right across the face." Then she gets up and walks away. I guess she was hoping that maybe I wasn't quite as bad as she said I was.

And how old were you when you kissed her?

My boyfriend

This text was generated by https://talktotransformer.com/ using the prompt "a red scarf"

What do you think? Weird, and perhaps a little uncomfortable? I really don't want to know if she's "kissing him there" or where that might be. Or if thin lips are really such a big problem? Maybe I'm missing something that the artificial intelligence who wrote this knows that I don't.

In contrast, here's what I wrote last year:

Swinging in the breeze was a bright red scarf. It was wrapped around a branch on the maple tree near the fence. It wasn’t there when George arrived. That meant someone put it out there in the last few minutes. I opened the patio door, looked around, then walked over to the tree. It stood just 20 feet from my house.

I easily pulled the scarf from the limb and recognized it immediately. It was a scarf identical to the one Remosa used to lure Charles into the grove in Red Scarlet Night, my second book in the series.

What the hell was going on? I rushed upstairs to my closet to see if this was my scarf - the one that inspired the story - or another one. Hanging on the hook in the back was my scarf. Looking at them next to each other I could see the small color and texture differences.

Relieved, I sat on the bed to think things through. Two items, that were from my first two novels, appear the day I finish my new novel. George insisted he hadn’t told anyone, but he must have let it slip somewhere right?

Was someone trying to tell me I should have been writing about Remosa instead? Maybe some rabid fan hacked my online storage account and read the manuscript. But how could they get this close to me?

The door. I realized I forgot to close the patio door.

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I like to think mine is more creative! But what do you think?



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Thumbnail Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
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