Dopecentury LI --- (A convo with Chat GPT on the topic)
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: "the monotony rarely becomes tedious.") My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these "Dopecentury" entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
I put this question of Dopesmoker-aesthetic-in-written-prose-form to Chat GPT. Chat GPT did a great job of describing what made Dopesmoker special, I was honestly impressed. But the sample texts it created led me into an uncanny place, where I felt like I was talking to myself. This might seem like a good thing, but it wasn't because, once prompted to push a little on the Dopesmoker aesthetic, the texts it created were disturbingly similar to my own writing on this project. Right down to some of the same imagery I've used: bottomless holes of blackness and machines that tick as they cool. (Since the AI pulls those from statistical likelihood, does that mean those image are, by definition, cliché?) Worse than that though was this sensation that I was myself falling down a bottomless hole: pushing the AI more and more just got me more results like something I might have written. The AI was perfectly capable of creating moments of quality, just like me. And also just like me, it seemed incapable of pushing past that to a new place — that is, to something I haven't seen before. It made me feel like the AI and I were trapped, having a conversation where I expressed my desire to achieve something wholly unique and fascinating, and the AI just could not produces something that I wouldn't be able to produce myself. As if we are, in a way, stuck at the same level, when what we need is someone who can pull us up to a new level. Maybe what the AI is telling me is that level doesn't exist, and neither does the person who might know how to achieve it. Here's the conversation:
https://chatgpt.com/share/677ae990-d6f4-800f-b693-f54cc111b5ec