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| title | date | description | type | tags | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Making of Avatar | 2023-01-05T22:46:52Z | How my previous post was written | post |
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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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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)
Sokka: Yo, Aang. You gotta HODL on to that earth, man. Don't let it slip through your fingers like a FOMO-induced trade.
Katara: Sokka, what are you talking about?
Sokka: Cryptocurrency, Katara. It's the future of money.
Katara: Sokka, we're trying to focus on Aang's earthbending training. Can you please save the crypto talk for later?
Sokka: Fine, fine. But just remember, Aang. You gotta stay strong in this bear market. Don't let the FUD get to you.
(Later)
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.
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?
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.
Conveniently, the 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 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.)
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.
And there you have it, an over-50-page satirical book written in a day with the help of ChatGPT!