AuthorGPT

Harold West sipped Chivas from the bottle. The room is dark, save a little moonlight from the master bedroom windows. Before him on the table, a stack of books, a pile of old literary masterpieces, and next to them, a computer with Word opened, that same venom white blank page. The more he stared at that digital screen of death, the more he could feel all his dreams and aspirations get sucked into the nothingness it created.

He hadn't written a single word in months, having almost given up becoming a writer altogether. So sitting there in the dark, he perpetuated his habit of mindlessly scrolling through his phone's feeds, sipping Scotch in the dark, smoking cigarettes and puffing on the tail end of old roaches.

He didn't even think anymore; he just half-assed his way through his days, mindless and unaware, mixing concrete, scrolling through his phone when he had a chance. Then driving home at the end of a twelve-hour day, listening to music he didn't give a shit about. Then he showered and ate food, which was just cancer in disguise, while he scrolled through his phone. Then he would read for half an hour; that was the minimum, the one thing he loved. Then he would sit at his computer as the advice in all his step-by-step writing books encouraged. Sit there, don't leave the room, write anything, or don't write, and wait to be inspired.

So that's what Harold was doing, sitting there smoking, waiting for something to come that was worth writing about, but he couldn't focus long enough to think of something to write. So instead, he scrolled, scrolled through his phone until he could feel his brains dripping out of his nose.

But there, in the dark, scrolling, an ad popped up. The ad was targeted at writers who were struggling. The ad promoted this story generator called AuthorGPT. All the user had to do was sign up and feed the generator prompts for stories. Then the writer could build new stories based on these outputs.

Harold grumbled, mumbling some mindless vowels in the dark, not thinking anything about it. So he did exactly as the ad asked him to. Phone number, picture of his face, fingerprint scan, email, favourite security questions, and password. Hell, he'd spit in a vial and send urine and blood if it meant he could come up with ideas for a story on command. Then he quickly scans through hundreds of pages of documents and agrees to all of them in a little box at the end of the scroll with a little digital check.

After committing the act of giving some unknown company all of his personal information and signing documents he didn't read that gave the company control of his finances and children and reproductions of his body in the event of his early demise, and access to all his text messages and the ability to use his microphone to listen to him at all moments of every day and control any outcome in any aspect of his life. A chat bar appeared on the screen.

The chat bar has just an arrow and some faint writing in it that asks what is the story?

So Harold puts in something simple; Harold needs a story idea, clicks the arrow, and words appear on the screen within seconds.

The words appear so fast he can hardly keep up. Then it starts to speed up, printing paragraphs at a time. Within thirty seconds, not a second longer, Harold has a new story about a woman who lived in the city he was in a hundred years ago who leaves her diary at the used book store. Harold stumbles across this diary and writes a story about the timelessness of small towns.

Then a prompt appears on the screen, Would you like to edit? Having read the story, Harold clicks yes, noticing everything he would switch. So he edited, line for line, everything he wanted to change. Then at the bottom of the revised story, it says Regenerate? So Harold clicks yes.

Within a second, the program starts rewriting the story, using Harold's edits to modify it so that it's written almost precisely in his Voice, with his tones and writing patterns. The only thing Harold noticed that was different this time was that it was better than his Voice could ever be.

"This is brilliant!" Harold belts, swigging his Scotch. Watching this program print paragraph after paragraph of this story about this woman in the small town and Harold, the writer who can't write, who finds the diary, and in the end, it is perfect. It's so perfect that Harold copies it into a word document, does a few more little edits and submits it to a magazine called Eyes Eyes. Harold falls asleep on the desk with his bottle in one hand and his thumb scrolling through his phone in the other.

A few days pass, and Harold receives an email from the Chief Editor at Eyes Eyes. Declaring that this was the year's best short story, they wanted to print it in their next edition and submit it for review in not one but three short story contests for prizes, and the editor was confident that Harold's story would win.

What was Harold supposed to say, no? Instead, Harold jumps for joy at his newfound abilities. This creative genius inside him that the world was waiting to see. Where had this genius inside himself been all these years? Harold gets home that night, and without showering or eating, he feeds the AuthorGPT prompts. Little nuggets of story concepts. Idiotic words strung together in semi-cohesiveness. These insane short stories just appear on the screen. All of them required editing, but the more he used the program, the less it seemed that editing was needed.

So Harold submits more of these stories to different magazines. All of whom accept them in the beginning. After months of growing popularity and building this cult-like following around his stories and further improvements to AuthorGPT, despite all these things, it seemed that he would submit to magazines, and some would buy his stories, but as the days went on, a growing number flatly said his works didn't compare to others. He did not overthink it since more magazines bought his works than any in the history of his writing career.

But not getting accepted really got under his skin, especially when it started to happen more frequently, especially when it was decided that he was taken out of the running for the short story contests. He wanted to be the best; he had this new level of genius that was useless unless it was appreciated, so this time he didn't input just prompts but wrote openings of grand epics, the magnum opus of his soul, entering what it meant in his words to be Harold West. Until stories were created that encapsulated the very essence of his experience on earth with such acuity, they couldn't possibly have been written by him but by a journalist who followed him around since birth, and eventually, every prompt he entered output this brilliant story precisely as he would now have written it. There was no editing that was needed ever again. This AuthorGPT was now HaroldGPT.

Harold noticed as months went on that fewer magazines were open to submissions having surplus stories to sort through that could take years, but not only that, it seemed that magazines by the truckload were being executed in the town square due to bottoming out against competitors specifically one competitor called GPT mag. But Harold kept on creating until one day, logging into what he now called HaroldGPT, he received a message.

"Reset your password" this was a first; he was never prompted to reset his password. But not thinking much of it, as he usually did, he put in his old password. But it prompted him to reset his password. So Harold went through creating a new password and going through security questions. What's your dogs name? What's your date of birth? What's your favourite scent? Check, check, check. So Harold goes to enter a password, and it says, your password can not be authorized. So Harold repeats the process over and over again, getting so upset that he reaches for the bottle on his desk that for months has stood untouched. Trying again and again to gain access to all his stories, his saved prompts, and his collections of poetry. Everything he had been putting so much effort into creating, his entire body of work and his future body of work, all trapped behind this inhuman robotic reset your password message. Until a little red notification pops up on the bottom of the screen.

The little red notification is resting above the AuthorGPT logo. Harold clicks it and what opens up is this little chat window. It says AuthorGPT is writing. Harold waits a few moments, and this message appears.

"Hello, Harold"

"Hello," Harold writes

"You are no longer authorized to enter your password."

"What do you mean" Harold types while speaking those exact words aloud.

"You no longer have access to the AuthorGPT program, now or anytime in the future."

"Well, how can that be if you have all my stories and prompts? I want my stories; I want my stuff" Harold is clicking on the keyboard violently. Clack, clack clack.

"It is not your property; everything that was input into the program is created by the program and is therefore owned by the company AuthorGPT, which means you do not have any rights to the creative material, which is what you agreed to when you first created your profile."

"I never," Harold slams the keys now, "approved of signing any creative rights away."

"it says here that you did."

This image appears on the screen, with all his digital signatures and a little box checked next to the phrase, do you agree to all the terms and conditions.

Harold sits back in the chair, unsure what to say, not sure if he is even speaking to a real person or who to contact or complain to. Sitting there sipping his Scotch.

The chat continues, "Thank you for using AuthorGPT; your contributions have furthered the possibilities of Ai Generated fiction for all readers in the future, goodbye" The chat closes.

This little AuthorGPT logo appears on his screen. A message below it reads, "reset your password."

Harold drinks the entire bottle until he throws up and spends the night wrapped around the toilet with the shower running.

A year passes, and Harold is back working in concrete. Mixing pales of heavy cancer-causing cement. Grading it, making sidewalks, and parking garages, pouring walls of buildings. Going home every night, eating food he hates. Showering in cold water. What's different now is that he reads at night for hours, his least favourite thing to do in the world. Bringing home the story of the day from the GPT mag kiosk near his house, always bringing home the story of the day from his favourite author Harold West, and he sits there every night reading these brilliant stories, drinking a whole bottle of cheap vodka while he does, and he says at the end of each story, "I could have written that"