The Cookie Cutter Sucks

[phantasm]

Stories, stories, stories, everywhere a story.

Everywhere you turn-- the world is saturated with 'em.

Protagonists and heroes. Saviors galore.

Antagonists and villains. The destroyers of worlds.

Everyone's got a winning story under their hat, or so they say.

"This'll knock 'em dead! We're basically just ripping off the life I'm already living. Ya know?"

So many stories. So many formulae. Variables and constants, carrying out their mathematically designed functions.

Everyone's buying the same cookie cutters from the hardware store, stamping out and mass producing cookies.

Except stories are not cookies. You read it, you watch it, it's still there once you're done with it.

Everyone thinks they know what a good story is. We've seen so many, we've read so many.

Sic a villain on some poor schmuck, watch the guy rise from the ashes to get his revenge on his enemy.

Watch the plot of the story un-spool for 200 pgs or a good solid couple of hours.

I am sick of sugar cookies in the shape of crescent moons and five pointed stars. 

I want new possibilities. I want brown sugar, not the white stuff. Make the cookies with goose eggs instead of chicken eggs.

Add some oysters to the recipe. Pour on the 1% soy milk, not the whole milk of cows.

Shape the cookies with your fingers.Take your cookie cutters and smash them with a hammer.

But They, with a capital 'T', have poisoned the well. They, those people over there, have convinced us all--  stories have to be alike in order to be "good."

Storytelling has been commercialized, sanitized, strafed in just the right spots. Everyone has to practice affirmative action in their cast of characters.

The villain always has to be clear and obvious, going on the attack. There always has to be a world-ending catastrophe we have to stop. Or, there's a

McGuffin everyone is chasing, obsessed with, willing to kill or die to obtain, even if no one is completely sure what 'It' is.

Not every story has to be protagonist v antagonist. Not every story has to be an epic battle between Good and Evil.
Most stories are "Man v Man," yes, they are, that's true. Even some of the best the world has ever seen take that shape.

But...........................

What if I wanted a man up against his own delusions?

Or, what if I want a story where a man is both the protagonist and antagonist? What if "the enemy" doesn't know they're going to be attacked until it's too late, and are on the defensive?

What if I want a story about mischaracterization, misappropriation, misperception?

What if there were no good guys, no bad guys?

What if there were good guys and bad guys, but the good guys have made mistakes they don't recognize, and the villains have virtues?

What if people with funny accents were our allies, not our enemies?

What if there were no enemies?

All I want is more variety, and to be able to find that variety more easily.

Is that too much to ask?

[phantasm]

It occurs to me that stuff like ChatGPT leans pretty heavily on the cookie cutter. It's been feed millions upon millions of words from books, articles, etc. It's been designed to look for patterns and to imitate them.

A large language model could, for example, analyze every Sherlock Holmes book ever written by Doyle. Using that information, it could produce a new mystery in a Doyle-istic style. Sort of.

But could it come up with something genuinely new? An entirely new villain for Holmes to pursue? Or would an LLM simply lean on the crutch of say, Moriarty?

The real problem is understanding. An LLM can certainly produce. But, for now, it seems, it doesn't understand what it's producing. It's just stringing words and sentences together in ways that are likely to make sense, to us as human beings.

Could ChatGPT come up with a children's story like Dr. Seuss, on its own, without ever having read a children's book before?

[anirbas]

Thanks for sharing, Birthday Boy! Haha. Tag! You're it! Been telling you HB since 2004, my dear, old friend! Best wishes for many more.

Now, at this point, I don't believe Ai, can replace writers or painters. The writing is formulaic and the formula we fed it, at that. If Ai had never read Dr. Suess, I don't think it could whip it out, either.

Future Ai, who knows? I know I don't like Ai art. It looks fake.

[artolmaeus]

could God be his own worst enemy. I love the "draw and pull in" level in this writ, so, I am killing a bag of potatoe chips binge reading all the shades between and looking at the lines drawn, and drinking a whole two liter diet soda to do so, on the left corner of a three person couch, thinking, yeah, fuck yeah, and then, I should just clean up and get outside and be all that, another chip, goes down the whole.

[phantasm]

Thanks, guys. I appreciate the comments you all toss my way.

[anirbas]

Nods at Phantasm and Artolmaeus.