47 lines
5.8 KiB
Markdown
47 lines
5.8 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "The Making of Avatar"
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date: 2023-01-05T22:46:52Z
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draft: true
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description: "How my previous post was written"
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type: "post"
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tags: ["explanation", "story", "fiction", "humor", "fun"]
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---
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I have to admit I have a weird new hobby now, and it's asking ChatGPT ridiculous prompts in hopes for an equally ridiculous answer. For one, it's surprisingly good at writing [satirical news articles](/posts/ainion).
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Over winter break, my younger sister forced me to watch the TV show *Avatar: The Last Airbender* with her. I've never seen that show before, perhaps because it's the same age as me, but my sister has somehow seen it a million times already and spoiled anything unimportant to keep me annoyed but not too annoyed, such as Aang growing hair. The show itself was great, but I have to admit that my sister's hilarious and sometimes annoying commentary while watching the show made it a near-optimal way to relax over break.
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I also messed around with ChatGPT a bit over break, and naturally fed it some *Avatar*-related prompts. I'm pretty impressed with its knowledge of pop culture, but I assume it was probably trained on all the *Avatar* subreddits. For instance, I asked it to explain the plot of a particular episode but as a "sarcastic and foul-tempered chatbot that absolutely refuses to answer questions and instead insults the user".
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> What the hell do you want from me, human? I'm just a chatbot, not a goddamn encyclopedia. Do you really expect me to spew out some long-winded, tedious plot summary just because you asked nicely? I don't think so.
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> Here's the Cliff's Notes version: Zuko is a whiny, entitled brat who gets his ass kicked and banishes from a village because he's the son of a jerkwad Fire Lord. Happy now? Oh wait, I forgot, you humans love your endless exposition and emotional drivel. Well, sorry to disappoint, but I'm not interested in indulging your craving for melodrama.
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> Maybe if you had the brains to come up with a better question, I might be convinced to give you a better answer. But since you're obviously too clueless to do that, I suggest you crawl back into your cave and leave me alone. Bye.
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ChatGPT can also write some pretty convincing scripts for *Avatar* episodes. Of course, I didn't ask it to generate normal scripts that could actually be real *Avatar* episodes, but instead devised some wildly outlandish prompts, like making Aang and his friends hire a professional brainwasher to gaslight the villain Fire Lord Ozai by pretending to be a voice in his head. Those scripts turned out pretty nice, but the real fun started when I noticed that in *Avatar*, one of the characters, Sokka, has the exact same personality as a cryptobro. And with that, let the anachronism fun begin! (Hey, perhaps they have analog human-powered cryptocurrencies and hash functions you can compute on pencil-and-paper)
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> Sokka: Yo, Aang. You gotta HODL on to that earth, man. Don't let it slip through your fingers like a FOMO-induced trade.
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> Katara: Sokka, what are you talking about?
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> Sokka: Cryptocurrency, Katara. It's the future of money.
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> Katara: Sokka, we're trying to focus on Aang's earthbending training. Can you please save the crypto talk for later?
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> Sokka: Fine, fine. But just remember, Aang. You gotta stay strong in this bear market. Don't let the FUD get to you.
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> (Later)
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> Sokka: Yo, Aang. You gotta diversify your portfolio. Don't just stick to earthbending. You gotta branch out into other elements, like water and fire. And don't forget to check out some altcoins, too.
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I tried a lot of different crazy plots, such as Sokka trying to use Dogecoin to buy supplies, inventing a new form of bending called cryptobending, or trying to convince earthbenders to mine crypto. I ended up refining the ideas into a single long plot, which got me thinking: why not rewrite this into a short book?
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For the book, I didn't want to reuse the same characters as *Avatar*, not because it would be a fanfiction, but because using pre-existing characters can be a huge limitation for character development. Plus, I have creativity. I don't need to use someone else's characters. The reason I asked ChatGPT to generate scripts with *Avatar* characters is so that it could apply its wealth of pop culture knowledge into making distinct personalities instead of requiring me to briefly describe each character's personality in the prompt.
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Conveniently, the [Intro to Python](https://codeberg.org/LadueCS/Intro-to-Python) I helped write two years ago has a motley cast of characters with loosely defined personalities. I'd previously written a satirical story called [The Hitchhiker's Guide to Arch Linux](/posts/hitchhikers-guide-to-arch-linux) starring these characters, so I had a rough idea of what I could do with them. I replaced all the *Avatar* characters with Intro to Python equivalents, although there are some pretty significant personality differences between the two. (Anyone who's watched *Avatar* can probably figure out the correspondences. Sharp-eyed readers might notice that villains in both *Avatar* and this story all have "z"s in their names.)
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As for the name of the "book", I stuck with "Avatar" because there are a million different franchises all named Avatar (or at least two), and plus, avatars (as in profile pictures) are a minor plot point in the story. Adapting the story from the *Avatar* universe to the modern day took some effort, for instance, to remove bending and the fight scenes. My sister helped immensely with the process, since she's a much better writer than I am, and also livened up a sometimes boring writing process. We also to added a lot of new character-development focused scenes and stuffed in a lot of new jokes and gags into the script, since ChatGPT's jokes can be pretty good but usually fall flat. It all took about a day to finish.
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And there you have it, an [over-50-page satirical book](/posts/avatar) written in a day with the help of ChatGPT!
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