Many of my author friends on facebook have experimented with ChatGBT. Their results have been very impressive. The stories they’ve asked it to write, have been convincing and entertaining. It’s difficult to perceive that they’ve been written by a machine. The only thing the ChatGBT stories lacked, in my opinion, was dialogue.
So I asked it to tell me about David West, author of The Spy who Sank the Armada. If I didn’t know quite a lot about myself, I would have taken the result as gospel. It was well written and entirely plausible. The AI got a few things right. For example, I did go to Oxford University, but to study engineering, not history. I was born in 1959 rather than 1948.
What puzzles me is that it could have looked at the about page of this website to get real facts. I know that the Google indexing bots have crawled over it, because Google does send traffic to my site. It could also have looked me up on LinkedIn. Another thing ChatGBT could have done is check me, and my books, on Amazon. There it would have found that the hero of the book is Sir Anthony Standen, rather than Martin Frobisher. Although Frobisher was a pirate and fought against the Spanish Armada, I haven’t read any source that claims he infiltrated the Spanish Fleet, as a spy, to obtain intelligence.
My little experiment has shown my that ChatGBT can be imaginative and convincing. If that’s what we’re looking for, then great! It could be a good author, if it mastered dialogue. However the great pain and pleasure of historical fiction is research. I expect an internet AI tool to be more rigorous in trawling through all available sources. I applaud the imagination, but combined with a paucity of accuracy, I’m worried. Has HAL 9000 finally arrived?