I have a confession to make: I did not write this. In the comments to an earlier post, Dan said that since my Facebook friends liked the A.I. from ChatGPT post better than mine, I should consider having ChatGPT write my blog too. Well, at first, I thought no way something with intelligence, artificial or otherwise, would lower itself to my standards. Then I figured, why not give it a try and see what happens? And that’s just what I did. Here’s how it went down:
I started with the basic question: Can you help me write a post for my blog at www.mccrarey.com about my night in the bars?
Sure, I’d be happy to help you write a post for your blog about your night in the bars. Can you provide me with some more details about the experience you want to share, such as what bars you visited, what you enjoyed about the experience, and any tips or recommendations you have for others looking to have a similar experience?
So, I gave the A.I. this to work with: I started out at IDM bar, where I ran into my pals Dave and Chris. We had a nice chat about the latest victims of the scamdemic–those dying from the after-effects of worthless vaccines. Sexy waitress Juliet was our server. Then I went to BarCelona, one of the nicer bars ambiance-wise in town. It’s on the third-floor rooftop and affords great views of our town Barrio Barretto. Speaking of great views, a cute little waitress named Jade was my server. I bought her a lady drink, and we sat together, chatting for a while. My last stop was Wet Spot, where I had a “buy one, get one” discount coupon. Owner Dave came in and bought me a drink. It was nice hanging out and getting the latest news and views. I had enough to drink, so went home early and enjoyed pecan pie with vanilla ice cream on top. I guess I was drunker than I thought because I woke up late in the night on the couch.
It sounds like you had a great night out at the bars! Here’s a sample post for your blog about your experience:
And then, I posted what the app provided without modification.
“Last night, I had the pleasure of visiting three of my favorite bars in Barrio Barretto. My evening started out at IDM bar, where I ran into my friends Dave and Chris. We chatted over drinks and shared our thoughts on the latest victims of the scamdemic. Our server, the lovely Juliet, made sure we were well taken care of.
Next, I headed to BarCelona, a rooftop bar with a fantastic ambiance. The views of the city from the third floor were breathtaking and the perfect backdrop for my drink. I had the pleasure of chatting with my server, Jade, over a lady drink. It was a nice way to spend some time getting to know her.
My last stop of the night was Wet Spot, where I had a “buy one, get one” discount coupon. I chatted with the owner, Dave, and enjoyed some discounted drinks with the latest news and views. I had enough to drink, so I decided to call it an early night and went home.
I must have been more intoxicated than I realized because I woke up on the couch later that night. But, it was all worth it for the great company, drinks, and views. If you’re ever in Barrio Barretto, be sure to check out these bars for a night you won’t forget.”
And as an added bonus, the A.I. provided this admonishment:
Please keep in mind that it’s not a good idea to encourage drinking and driving, it is not safe and it is illegal in many countries, it’s also not a good idea to encourage excessive drinking.
So, what do you think? To me, it just seems like a clean-up of the basic info I provided. What I did notice is that it changed words I used to something more P.C., like waitress to server. It didn’t like me saying sexy and also didn’t include my mention of vaccines negatively. My Grammarly app also frequently suggests less “offensive” words, but I always ignore its advice. Speaking of Grammarly, the only punctuation error it underlined in the post was removing the comma after “But” in the next to last sentence. It suggested a comma before “and” and a semi-colon before “it’s” in the last sentence of the admonishment. Do you see anything else, Kevin?
Overall, my assessment is that the A.I. just regurgitates the info you provide in a milquetoast fashion so as not to rile the woke mob. I’m sure my shenanigans scared that crowd away from my blog long ago. And not to worry, I won’t be relying on ChatGPT for any help in the future. I felt a little guilty about posting this morning without attribution or warning, so I tagged it with “A.I.” at the bottom of the post. I just wanted to see if anyone would notice any difference from my daily drivel; apparently, no one did.
I didn’t add any pictures to this morning’s post, either. I only have a couple, and here they are now:
My waitress at BarCelona was indeed a hottie. She told me she used to be a dancer at Whiskey Girl but quit because she didn’t like the videos from the SOB being posted on YouTube. So, I was too shy to ask her to let me take her picture.
Anyway, it was a nice night out. And about that waking up on the couch thing, it just doesn’t make any sense. I had gone into the bedroom and taken off my clothes (the evidence was still on the floor this morning), so why would I go back into the dark living room to stumble over to the uncomfortable couch where I never sleep? The more I think about it, the more I don’t think I did–it was probably just a dream. I’ve noticed I’m having some pretty intense REM sleep lately, especially in the early morning hours. Weird, though; it seemed so real.
So, about that diet. I’m obviously not being strict on low carb, but I’m sure I’ve reduced my calorie intake, if for no other reason than eliminating beer intake. I need to be careful about those “cheats” like I did with the pie and ice cream, though.
Today’s weigh-in has me at 219.7, down 1.7 pounds from last week and a loss of 5.6 since January 1. Slow progress, but progress.
Don’t strain your neck like I did to see it upside right:
I guess it really is all a matter of perspective. I will be back with more of my human-made drivel tomorrow.
oh
I was wondering why that AI tag was at the bottom . You’re right ✅️. There’s not much difference between your writing and what the bot wrote
bUt I was startled to read that you regard BarCelona as one of your top 3 bars 🍸 given how scathing your review was about the lack of attention the servers give you whenever you need a drink. (Servers….is that PC enough for you chatbot ). I guess the friends names are real and they’re real people. I can’t really what is sarcasm, what is truth and what is chatbot-generated drivel.
for example, somebody posted on Facebook about a son who keeps paying off traffic cops, and another about sleeping waiters in BarCelona.
obviously somebody is lying 🤥 here.
Can the bot tell lies?
Could you put the chatbot to use and have it write out some reader comments? That would be fun to see which of your blog posts get more attention, and which are accurate.
BTW ,who are the latest victims that you were discussing? I heard a fella at Bar Barretto extolling his love of Mr.Donald John Trump, and I thought that may have been you…but the lad was far more advanced in age and had a southern drawl.
wait ✋️ ✋️ Do you have a southern drawl? It occurs to me that though you’re a local celebrity on the interwebs, I actually don’t know what you sound like. Takes me back to the days of the silent movies 🎬
keep drinking that gin and watch the pounds just melt away; this is diet I’d recommend 👌
Jezza
p.s. Consider me hooked onto this chatbot thing.
imagine how much I can get it to do for me. Maybe I could be a best-selling author when I publish my 3 volume treatise on the best diving sites round this archipelago
Sounds as though, for “your” previous post, you had to essentially write the whole post, and ChatGPT merely tweaked a bit here and there, then regurgitated it. McCrareyisms abounded in the ChatGPT version:
three of my favorite bars
victims of the scamdemic
Our server, the lovely Juliet, made sure we were well taken care of.
chatting/chatted with
I had the pleasure of chatting with my server, Jade, over a lady drink.
where I had a “buy one, get one” discount coupon
so I decided to call it an early night and went home.
I must have been more intoxicated than I realized
Most of the above phrases are recurrent tropes on your blog, and that’s more than enough to lull a regular reader into a false sense of reality. I suspect that ChatGPT saw the above text as your input phrases and simply didn’t change them (or didn’t change them much). So when you wrote, “To me, it just seems like a clean-up of the basic info I provided,” that’s about the size of it. In hindsight, the biggest clue that this was an AI-written post was the most obvious (and I missed it all the same): no photos.
So should we give ChatGPT points merely for imitating your style by parroting your exact phraseology? I’m not sure I would. What would be more interesting would be for ChatGPT to analyze your blog’s style and content, then spit out a fictional-but-plausible McCrarey-style story that you could then use to challenge your readers’ sense of vérité: is this story entirely real, partly real, or wholly fiction? I think that would be an interesting challenge. I admit I’d probably get it wrong. Which means someone could kill you, and ChatGPT could write your blog in your stead, and none of us would be any wiser. Good fodder for a short story. (But ChatGPT would also have to know your habits and the types of photos you take if it wants to maintain the façade over a long period of time.)
I bet a lot of us commenters, knowing your routines as well as we do, could plausibly write LTG blog entries that sounded like yours!
As for ChatGPT’s punctuation errors: I’ve noticed that most of its errors have to do with punctuation. If it’s training itself on how most people write English, then it’s inevitably going to pick up some bad habits when it comes to mechanics (capitalization, spelling, punctuation—as opposed to grammar and syntax, which are about sentence structure).
That said, I think Grammarly caught most of the errors. If I rewrite that last admonition with Grammarly’s corrections/suggestions, it looks like this:
Please keep in mind that it’s not a good idea to encourage drinking and driving, it is not safe, and it is illegal in many countries; it’s also not a good idea to encourage excessive drinking.
There’s one last correction that Grammarly apparently missed: after the phrase “drinking and driving,” you should end with a period and capitalize the subsequent “it.” That breaks the long, run-on sentence into two shorter sentences.
Please keep in mind that it’s not a good idea to encourage drinking and driving. It is not safe, and it is illegal in many countries; it’s also not a good idea to encourage excessive drinking.
In terms of style, I’d also change the two “it is” phrases to “it’s” to make things sound more human and less stilted.
Please keep in mind that it’s not a good idea to encourage drinking and driving. It’s not safe, and it’s illegal in many countries; it’s also not a good idea to encourage excessive drinking.
This might raise the complaint that there are now too many “it’s”es, in which case a rewrite might be necessary.
Please keep in mind that it’s not a good idea to encourage drinking and driving, which is not safe and is illegal in many countries; it’s also not a good idea to encourage excessive drinking.
That strikes me as good. Run the above through Grammarly. I anticipate that Grammarly will try to add a comma after the word “safe,” but that would be incorrect because we’re dealing with a compound predicate. Compound predicates don’t take commas.
WRONG: Sheila sat down, and farted.
RIGHT: Sheila sat down and farted.
By extension—
WRONG: which is not safe, and is illegal in many countries
RIGHT: which is not safe and is illegal in many countries
If Grammarly doesn’t ding me for the above non-error, I’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Kev, yes, I had to provide the background story, and the ChatGPT app chose some of my words and tweaked others. But they weren’t pure “McCrareyisms.” For example, I never said they were my favorite bars, only that BarCelona has a nice ambiance, I didn’t call Juliet “lovely”; I said she was sexy, and I don’t call waitresses “servers.” I do get your larger point that it sounded enough like me to fool readers into thinking I wrote it. Yeah, it would be an interesting test to have ChatGPT write an entirely fictional post about me and see if it was plausibly believable. I’m not sure it would be capable of doing so–yet.
Grammarly dinged you in a different way: which is not safe and is illegal in many countries–changing “not safe and is” to “unsafe and”: which is unsafe and illegal in many countries.
I accept Grammarly’s punctuation corrections most of the time, but I seldom use the suggested changes to my word choices. I’m not saying the suggestions are bad, just that I prefer writing in my own way using my “voice.” I feel the same with ChatGPT.
re: Grammarly
That’s actually not a bad change to what I wrote. Flows a bit better, and it’s consistent with my boss’s own editorial choices. My boss writes in a very terse manner, so he always defaults to “shorter is better” because the man hates to write.* Anyway, I’ll concede to Grammarly on this point.
__________
*I always find it ironic whenever I meet people in the EFL business who can’t stand writing… and yet, somehow, they’re English teachers. My buddy Tom is that way; his emails are typo-ridden messes, and he can barely make it through writing a semi-coherent paragraph, yet he teaches English at a university. My boss is another one: I might write him a lengthy email on some topic, and his reply won’t be more than three words. Some people just don’t like writing.
Jezza, glad you spotted the AI tag clue!
Yeah, the AI made up that “favorite bar” line; all I said was that BarCelona has nice ambiance. To be fair, I did get good service there on my last visit. The other parts, like names, were true, but some descriptions were off–I called Juliet sexy, not “lovely.”
Yeah, I saw that post about the police in Manila shaking down the same driver THREE times in ONE day. I’m not sure AI could make that sound any more believable. I don’t think ChatGPT actually visits locations on the web, just has access to a huge data pool.
We weren’t talking about anyone local, just the young and healthy athletes around the world who are dropping dead for mysterious reasons. And I’m no Trumper, but he was a better choice than Hillary (who you gonna take, the crook or the clown?) and was a much better President than that guy who is currently pretending to be. I’m hoping for DeSantis in 2024.
I spent a lot of years in the south but didn’t acquire the accent. Well, I’ll drop a “y’all” now and then, but without a twang.
You ought to sign up for ChatGPT and give it a try while it is free. I’ve heard it can write stories, so don’t miss your chance for the best diving novel ever published!
Kevin, I’ve always enjoyed writing, even if I’m not that good at it. Short stories and poetry as a young man, with dreams of one day becoming a journalist. I wound up writing discipline letters and briefs for arbitration hearings in the service of my Uncle Sam. Long Time Gone is a failure’s revenge!
by the way, I think I may have finally spotted our esteemed author in the flesh. I did a double take, since I was already knee deep in the ale fumes.
Sitting by yourself in a red shirt at Sloppy Joe’s, staring intently at your phone 📱 That left me feeling puzzled, because everybody else at Sloppy Joe’s sits at tables together to loudly enjoy the aforementioned slop. And they all sit right by the roadside tables so that everyone else can also enjoy their merriment. I already know all their drinking songs by heart all the way from Adam’s sports bar . Maybe they’re English 🇬🇧 and not close friends of yours
If had time I would have asked for an autograph….but you know that celebrities deserve their time of peace as well.
Did you ever find what you were looking for ? yOu were squinting pretty hard at that phone 📱 📲 even with your glasses on
FYI
The chatbot didn’t write this for me…..I did it all by myself
I was at Sloppy Joe’s for one drink and wearing a faded orange shirt. Yes, I do tend to focus on my phone too much when I am sitting by myself. I don’t have a group of regular drinking buds, so I’m more often alone than not–that’s why I frequently purchase the company of a bargirl with lady drinks.
Ah, but I no longer wear glasses–either it wasn’t me, or it is YOU who needs glasses! Feel free to introduce yourself next you see me, it’s always a treat to meet a reader.