I know that your article isn’t specifically about the goose story, but I have to say that I strongly disagree with your assessment of the “failure” of the goose story.
First, you asked ChatGPT to write you a story, and one of the fundamental features of stories is that the author and the audience are not themselves inside the story It is entirely expected that ChatGPT does not model the reader as having been killed by the end of the world. In fact, it would be pretty bizarre if the robot did model this, because it would indicate a severe inability to understand the idea of fiction.
But is it a “swerve through the fourth wall” for the last paragraph to implicitly refer to the reader rather than the characters in the story? Only if you’re writing a certain style of novelistic fiction, in which the fiction is intended to be self-contained and the narrator is implicit (or, if explicit, does not exist outside the bounds of the story). But if you’re writing a fairy tale, a fable, a parable, a myth, an epic poem, a Greek drama, or indeed almost any kind of literature outside of the modernist novel, acknowledgement of the audience and storyteller is normal. It is, in fact, expected.
And your prompt is for the bot to write you a story about a goose who fails to prevent the end of the world. Given that prompt, it’s entirely to be expected that you get something like a fable or fairy tale. And in that genre the closing paragraph is often “the moral of the story”, which is always addressed to the audience and not the characters. When ChatGPT writes that the deeds of the goose “will always be remembered by those who heard his story,” it isn’t failing to model the world, but faithfully adhering to the conventions of the genre.
I know that your article isn’t specifically about the goose story, but I have to say that I strongly disagree with your assessment of the “failure” of the goose story.
First, you asked ChatGPT to write you a story, and one of the fundamental features of stories is that the author and the audience are not themselves inside the story It is entirely expected that ChatGPT does not model the reader as having been killed by the end of the world. In fact, it would be pretty bizarre if the robot did model this, because it would indicate a severe inability to understand the idea of fiction.
But is it a “swerve through the fourth wall” for the last paragraph to implicitly refer to the reader rather than the characters in the story? Only if you’re writing a certain style of novelistic fiction, in which the fiction is intended to be self-contained and the narrator is implicit (or, if explicit, does not exist outside the bounds of the story). But if you’re writing a fairy tale, a fable, a parable, a myth, an epic poem, a Greek drama, or indeed almost any kind of literature outside of the modernist novel, acknowledgement of the audience and storyteller is normal. It is, in fact, expected.
And your prompt is for the bot to write you a story about a goose who fails to prevent the end of the world. Given that prompt, it’s entirely to be expected that you get something like a fable or fairy tale. And in that genre the closing paragraph is often “the moral of the story”, which is always addressed to the audience and not the characters. When ChatGPT writes that the deeds of the goose “will always be remembered by those who heard his story,” it isn’t failing to model the world, but faithfully adhering to the conventions of the genre.