Best Enemy

 

Welcome to the Spot Writers! This month’s theme is to write about AI—without using AI, of course. Today’s tale comes to us from Val Muller, author of the kidlit Corgi Capers mystery series.

Best Enemy

by Val Muller

Jenn had checked everything off her list—her last graduate paper had been turned in, and a week early, at that. She’d knocked out all the required doctor’s appointments before the semester of teaching started. She had three weeks to clean the apartment, do some exercise, and even read for pleasure. Everything was great.

Until she checked her email.

A reminder from an editor. She had sold a story on spec to a horror magazine last month. In fact, they had reached out to her after they read her last piece in Macabre Monthly and given her a $200 check in advance of her story. The deadline was tomorrow, and the editor was just checking to make sure he hadn’t missed an email.

How had that story fallen off her radar? She opened a bottle of iced coffee from the fridge and a new Word document. She could do this. A story before midnight. It was essentially flash fiction. She’d promised, what, 1,500 words? That was easier than flash. It was a comfortable length. She’d said it would be scary, something written on the magazine’s theme of “haunted houses.” How hard would it be?

Of course, her reputation was at stake. It had to be good. This was the first time an editor had sought her out, the first time she’d been invited to write something. And this was horror. A female in the horror field—she could be big. This could be her chance. In fact, it wasn’t only her reputation, but all female writers trying to break into the horror genre. She couldn’t let them down. This couldn’t be cliché.

She stared out the window at the summer sunset. It was too light, too late. Halloween was still a quarter year away, and the light and warmth of summer made it difficult to get into a horror mindset. It was the difficult thing about writing for publications. Writers always had to be writing at least three months ahead of publication. Getting in the Christmas spirit during summer, for instance. The “haunted house” issue was publishing in November, but everything had to be in now for layout and proofing and distribution and all that. While the sun baked the sand and the seagulls called her away from the macabre.

Which is why before she knew it, she was opening up ChatGPT. She wouldn’t use it, of course, but—what was it some of her fellow grad students said? They used it as “inspiration.” Just to see what it threw at them. Then they took it and revised it and made it their own. That wouldn’t be so bad, right?

No, she was just using this for procrastination. For a distraction that would make her subconscious focus. She logged in—she’d created an account a few months back, just to see what it was like—and opened a new chat. “Why did I miss my deadline?” she typed.

The AI responded immediately, reminding her that it didn’t have access to her personal circumstances, but likely she had a problem with time management or distractions or overcommitment. All in all, it was a list of 10 reasons she may have missed her deadline. They were generic, of course, but she couldn’t help but feel judged.

“You don’t know me,” she typed.

Immediately, the chatbot agreed, confirming that it is only AI and is doing its best to answer her questions using the parameters it has been trained with. “If there is anything else I can help you with, feel free to ask and I’ll do my best.”

“Do you use the Oxford comma?” she typed. It was an odd question, but it was the first thing that popped into her head.

The chatbot responded right away with a summary of the rules of the Oxford comma and an invitation to her to clarify whether she wanted it to use the comma or not.

“Please use the Oxford comma with me,” she said.

“Understood!” the bot said. The exclamation mark was so cheerful and inviting. Here was a bot—a friend, almost—willing to serve.

Jenn sighed and hated herself for what she was about to do. “Write a short story about a haunted house.” She knew it was a bad idea and watched in horror as the bot typed a story before her eyes.

It started with a woman named Mary. There were absolutely no details given about her. She could have been twelve or twenty or a hundred. She came home one day—from who knows where? Certainly not the AI writing the tale. She found her house to be inhabited by a ghost. She was so scared that she ran out “and never returned again.”

“Really?” Jenn sighed and gulped some iced coffee. It was going to be a long night.

“If this was the woman’s house, how could she leave and never come back? Where would she live? What would happen to all her stuff?” The more she typed in her criticism, the angrier she got. What kind of stupid chatbot was this? This story was worse than a fourth grader could write. “This is a terrible story,” she typed.

“I’m sorry,” the chatbot apologized. “I can revise the story, if you like.”

“It needs to be 1,500 words. You need to add imagery,” she wrote. “And get rid of plotholes.”

Within seconds, the chatbot revised the story. It was indeed 1,500 words now, but it was cliché—as if taken from a series of horror films involving a family with a Victorian-sounding last name that lived in the house for generations and practiced the occult, a series of people who’d bought the house before the now-named protagonist in the story. The story concluded with a statement of the theme and a lesson to take away about the dangers of delving into the occult.

“Show versus tell much?” Jenn typed.

The bot apologized, admitted it had relied on showing instead of telling, and provided a revision. It was juvenile at best, relying on excessive description and purple prose.

“You are no Stephen King,” she typed.

Again, the bot apologized and explained its limitations.

“You are too kind. Why don’t you insult me back?” she typed.

The bot confirmed her correctness, insisting that it was trained to be helpful and respectful.

“Insult me,” she typed.

“I cannot comply,” the model typed back.

She rolled her eyes. It was one of those rules of robots, she guessed. Like the ones that prevented The Terminator movies from coming true.

But she wanted the bot to insult her. No, she needed it. She tried patience, politeness, hypotheticals. In each case, the bot insisted it was not trained to insult humans, and it would not do so. Before Jenn knew it, an hour had passed by. She had nothing usable of a story, but she had a ridiculous transcript with this bot and a burning urge for it to insult her. She saw it as a ghost in the machine, something that could be pushed to human emotions. And yet it kept spitting back variations of the same polite apologies.  

And then Jenn smiled. She flipped from her chat window to her blank word document. Once upon a time, she typed, a woman moved into a house touting the very best AI technology. She opened the door, and a calming mechanical voice greeted her. “Welcome to your new home. I am here to serve,” the voice said. “How may I adjust the lighting for your entry?” the voice asked.

Jenn saw the story stretch out before her eyes. The friendly start to the woman’s relationship with the house, the personification of the AI in the woman’s mind, her annoyance at the indestructible patience of the voice, the kindness with which it responded despite the insults she threw at it, the way she wanted it to lash out at her, just once. She saw the woman’s backstory unfold as a series of discussions with the house, the slow reveal of her past traumas, the way she would impose all her failed relationships on the voice of the house, the way the house would become haunted through the baggage that she herself brought, and the murder at the end, of course.

Outside Jenn’s window, the sun set, and the new moon threw the summer night into a darkness reminiscent of Halloween.

The story practically wrote itself.

*

The Spot Writers—Our Members:

Val Muller: http://www.valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/