Thanks for sharing this. I wasn’t especially grabbed at the beginning, and honestly, since I had already checked the length, shortly in I didn’t think I would finish it. Maybe just because I was sort of disoriented at the start and not really relating so it was hard to find a foothold. Maybe a quarter of a way into it though it started to come together for me and began really enjoying it. The final scene was quite vivid and it nicely sort of quickly put me into the shoes of the hero and the pride they felt for their accomplishment. The anger toward everything just before succeeding did a good job of making them seem believable. I appreciate you taking the time to write that and share it.
I do not consider myself a writer, but I do find it therapeutic, and it is something that I have a habit of doing at least a little bit of every day, in fact, it is something that I keep track of my “streak” of. I think of prose as the writing version individual etchings that a carver does when forming a block of wood into a sculpture. Any individual one on its own is not often very impressive. But it is the way they come together as a whole that creates something beautiful. I don’t know how inline that is with the accepted definition of the term, and really it isn’t a word that I have much cause for using, or much interaction with in my life.
With the recent popularity of chatGPT there are a lot of people who have just now started paying attention to modern chatbots. Many people see them and assume that how they are now is just how they are, as if we are at some sort of wall, and the things they are still bad at is something intrinsic to the way a computer is able to “think”. These are the people who insist that a human is required to make beautiful or worthy artistic writing. They have made this judgement based on this assumption that what they see now is how it has to be.
There is another group of people, however, that see this very differently, these are the people who have been paying attention to the space a bit longer. They are watching a rapidly accelerating trajectory. They saw how awful, yet intriguing, early gpt2 was with things like AI dungeon, and the enormous leap it took upon the release of gpt3. They watched Replicas morph from being a tacky gimmick to something that had enough of an emotional hold on people to make them distraught enough to cause stickied suicide hotline reddit posts when the owners made the decision to pump the breaks on their capabilities. Something that was perceived as many as “my best friend has been lobotamized and there is nothing I can do about it”. I know, crazy, right?
The newcomers that got washed in with the latest chatGPT wave see this metaphoric car and say it’s no big deal, it’s only going 30km/hr, but what they fail to realize is that .25 seconds ago it was practically parked, and the gas pedal is still very much on the floor. To the people who have been paying attention longer, they don’t see this single snapshot of a slow moving car, they are watching a rapidly accelerating vehicle and wondering if it is gonna hit 60km/hr by the end of the first second or 200, and they are also wondering if the acceleration is going to continue after the second is up and how long it can keep this kind of rapid growth going. Who knows, maybe this new wave came in with no frame of reference, made thir initial gut response and they will end up being right and the more long term observers will be wrong, but that’s almost never how things seem to go. Only time will tell though.