We’ve been talking about the “blandness” of ChatGPT’s attempts at creative writing.

These are a flaw of ChatGPT, not a flaw of the more basic language models that underlie ChatGPT.

Do you want to see how good this technology is at creative writing – when it doesn’t have ChatGPT’s weird add-ons? Here’s how:

• Register an account at https://beta.openai.com/, if you don’t already have one.
• Go to the playground, and select “code-davinci-002” from the Model dropdown. This model is free, so you don’t need to pay anything.
• Set “Temperature” to 1 instead of 0. Make sure you do this.
• Type the following into the prompt box. (Don’t copy/paste, which sometimes introduces formatting errors, just type it)

A novel

Chapter 1

(This is just a suggestion, of course you can and should try other things. Try including a title, for example, or even write the start of the chapter yourself if you want.)

• Press Submit.
• Read.