I Used AI to Create Apocalyptic Tales by Steinbeck, Seinfeld, and Trump

What if authors, comedians, and politicians wrote about the end of the world? ChatGPT helped me answer the question.

“We asked ChatGPT to generate three blog posts, and they were astounding. This chatbot could replace you in three years.” He said this casually, analytically, clinically, as if forgetting I was not an android. Then, a wave of empathy. “I mean… for technical stuff. You know?”

I responded the way writers always respond to existential career threats—authoritative BS infused with a Socratic flourish. Artificial intelligence could never channel true human voice, I said. It couldn’t learn the nuances of humor or syntax, let alone the emotional context of a topic. And what could it understand of psychology, of spirituality, of the Divine? Will humans be willing to take their spiritual cues from a robot?

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” he said, by which he meant, You have no idea what you’re up against. And he was right. I didn’t.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a chatbot released by OpenAI, the San Francisco artificial intelligence company in November of 2022. Its interface is simple. Type a request into the dialogue box, and using AI, ChatGPT generates a plain text response.

A guest on a podcast said she asked it to create “the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe,” and the result was nothing short of the best cookie she’d ever eaten.

Another said he asked it to write a love note, and though ChatGPT was certainly no Cyrano de Bergerac, the AI provided him with a great jumping-off spot to woo his lover.

A podcast host said he asked ChatGPT to write rap lyrics in the voice of Tupac Shakur, and the result made him believe the software had channeled the deceased West Coast rapper himself.

Others, though, have been less enamored. In a recent article at Business Insider, a Furman University philosophy professor indicated he’d caught students turning in essays that were likely written by ChatGPT. He’d used OpenAI’s ChatGPT Detector software to confirm there was a 99% likelihood the essays were generated by artificial intelligence. How was the essay? Well-written, though “just flatly wrong.”

Though these are intriguing anecdotes, I was still left wondering: Could ChatGPT replace writers, whether novelists, speech writers, or comedians? I wasn’t sure, so I created an apocalyptic experiment.

Writing the Apocalypse With ChatGPT

Apocalyptic and dystopian fiction is, for my money, the most human of all storytelling. It’s the sort of literature that’s both emotive and contextual, and it relies heavily on ancient myths. So, what if I asked ChatGPT to create works of dystopian fiction in the voice of authors, comedians, and public figures?

I formatted my request sentence: “Write a short story about the coming apocalypse in the voice of [name].” Then, I fed the request to ChatGPT using a variety of names from Steinbeck to Donald Trump. Here are the results, which have not been edited.

The AI Apocalypse: John Steinbeck

The sun beat down mercilessly upon the parched earth, as if it were a living thing, determined to scorch the life from the land. The fields were barren, the rivers dry, and the skies a hazy orange. The apocalypse had come, and with it, the end of the world as we knew it.