Judging by my limited experimentation with submitted prompts, several of them are are already superior to mine. But mine has the advantage of writing in a more academic tone, which I think is more suitable for this story.
Among the submitted ones, my current favorite is this one. The resulting prose is more human-like, but the tone is of a young-adult work, which is a disadvantage in many cases. An example:
Chapter One: An Outlier Among Outliers
Somebody had to keep an eye on the squiggly lines, and as it turned out, that person was me.
Hello there. I’m Dr. Kiera Laine. The more I understand about how the universe works, the less I understand about how the world works. I’m an astrophysicist, no, the astrophysicist, if you ask any of my colleagues in the snobbish circles of Oxford.
I’ve made a career of studying the Cosmos, charting the glittering highways of distant galaxies, the uncharted nebulae and black holes. Yet, in the world of academia, my job is equivalent to the janitor who strolls in when everybody else has gone home, only my broom is the supercomputer running complex algorithms.
Take the seismic data we were currently analyzing, for instance. To the ordinary human eye, it was just an endless sprawl of jagged lines across the monitor screen. To mine, it was poetry in motion.
On one seemingly ordinary Tuesday, sitting amidst towers of towering servers, and screens flickering with quantum code, I noticed a blip. An anomaly. A hiccup in the heartbeats of Earth. So subtle that anyone else might have missed it.
But hey, it’s the subtle ones that turn your world upside down, right?
This little blip was buried in layers of geological data gathered from sensors scattered around the globe. To be specific, it originated from the Arctic tundra, one of the coldest, remotest regions on Earth. Which was in itself, weird. These things didn’t usually come from the frozen wasteland.
To confirm my suspicions, I ran the data through another round of computations. It held up.
Well, that’s… different.
A smirk played on my lips as I spun in my chair, letting the dim light of the screens blur into streaks. I liked different. Different meant interesting. Interesting meant I wasn’t stuck in the eternal loop of the same old patterns.
If nothing else, this will give me something to wave in the faces of those who call me a ‘backroom boy’, huh?
The calculations I ran were robust, I knew that much. And the implications? They were hard to digest, even for someone like me, whose job description involved digesting the undigestible.
A part of me wanted to dismiss it as an error, an oversight, a faulty sensor, maybe. Yet, my intuition and the frisson of excitement curling through my veins told me otherwise.
So, what do you do when you stumble across a seismic anomaly hinting at the possibility of an ancient, technologically advanced civilization that existed around the time of the late Cretaceous period?
I chuckled to myself. It was indeed a question for the ages. The thought alone was ludicrous, absurd, impossible. And yet…
Oh, isn’t that the definition of science? The art of making the impossible possible.
I pulled up the geological timelines again, brushing a hand through my messy bun. The anomaly was at the precise layer of Earth’s crust that correlated with the era of the Troodon dinosaurs. An era where, according to the established norms of science, civilization as we define it today, was a mere gleam in the cosmic eye.
There is no such thing as a coincidence, Kiera, I reminded myself.
What I had in front of me was more than an anomaly. It was a door, creaking open to the unknown. It was a question mark against everything we thought we knew about the history of intelligence on Earth.
What I had in front of me was potentially the biggest discovery of the millennium.
Is it too early to start practicing my Nobel acceptance speech?
I stared at the blip again, my heart pounding like a drummer gone rogue. My mind wandered to the realms of the impossible, painting images of scaled, feathered creatures crafting tools, constructing dwellings, staring up at the stars with the same curiosity that I did.
Here be dragons, indeed.
And as the fluorescent lights of my tiny office flickered, casting an otherworldly glow on the static lines of data, I made my decision. This was too big to be swept under the rug of daily routines.
The world was about to be hit by a comet of knowledge, a comet of truth, a comet that might redefine the story of life on Earth. It was time to assemble a team, to embark on a year-long journey of discovery.
I drew in a breath, filled with anticipation and a tinge of apprehension. This was going to be interesting.
Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen.
And with a few quick keystrokes, I sent an email to the head of my department.
This prompt uses some of my own prompt in it, so I recognize the characteristic style. It’s a little over-the-top to the point of being hilariously bad at times (which is one reason why I enjoy it), but if you’re looking to tone it down then I suggest changing the “unique, sassy, ironic, sarcastic, and humorous voice” to just a “sarcastic and humorous voice.” That is what I’ve been doing lately, and the results have been much better. (By the way, the voice I was trying to emulate was Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels.)
One rookie mistake I see here and elsewhere in GPT-4′s writing is describing the POV character’s facial expressions. This is usually frowned upon in first-person and third-person limited POV because POV characters generally don’t perceive their own facial expressions unless they’re standing in front of a mirror. It’s better to say “I felt my cheeks burning” than “I blushed,” for example, because the former is truer of the POV character’s experiences.
If you want to try breaking GPT of these quasi-POV breaks, you could try adding a line about Deep POV, which is modern writing lingo for a highly immersive POV that stays completely in the POV character’s head. I would do it myself, but I don’t have access to GPT-4.
The original one.
Judging by my limited experimentation with submitted prompts, several of them are are already superior to mine. But mine has the advantage of writing in a more academic tone, which I think is more suitable for this story.
Among the submitted ones, my current favorite is this one. The resulting prose is more human-like, but the tone is of a young-adult work, which is a disadvantage in many cases. An example:
Chapter One: An Outlier Among Outliers
Somebody had to keep an eye on the squiggly lines, and as it turned out, that person was me.
Hello there. I’m Dr. Kiera Laine. The more I understand about how the universe works, the less I understand about how the world works. I’m an astrophysicist, no, the astrophysicist, if you ask any of my colleagues in the snobbish circles of Oxford.
I’ve made a career of studying the Cosmos, charting the glittering highways of distant galaxies, the uncharted nebulae and black holes. Yet, in the world of academia, my job is equivalent to the janitor who strolls in when everybody else has gone home, only my broom is the supercomputer running complex algorithms.
Take the seismic data we were currently analyzing, for instance. To the ordinary human eye, it was just an endless sprawl of jagged lines across the monitor screen. To mine, it was poetry in motion.
On one seemingly ordinary Tuesday, sitting amidst towers of towering servers, and screens flickering with quantum code, I noticed a blip. An anomaly. A hiccup in the heartbeats of Earth. So subtle that anyone else might have missed it.
But hey, it’s the subtle ones that turn your world upside down, right?
This little blip was buried in layers of geological data gathered from sensors scattered around the globe. To be specific, it originated from the Arctic tundra, one of the coldest, remotest regions on Earth. Which was in itself, weird. These things didn’t usually come from the frozen wasteland.
To confirm my suspicions, I ran the data through another round of computations. It held up.
Well, that’s… different.
A smirk played on my lips as I spun in my chair, letting the dim light of the screens blur into streaks. I liked different. Different meant interesting. Interesting meant I wasn’t stuck in the eternal loop of the same old patterns.
If nothing else, this will give me something to wave in the faces of those who call me a ‘backroom boy’, huh?
The calculations I ran were robust, I knew that much. And the implications? They were hard to digest, even for someone like me, whose job description involved digesting the undigestible.
A part of me wanted to dismiss it as an error, an oversight, a faulty sensor, maybe. Yet, my intuition and the frisson of excitement curling through my veins told me otherwise.
So, what do you do when you stumble across a seismic anomaly hinting at the possibility of an ancient, technologically advanced civilization that existed around the time of the late Cretaceous period?
I chuckled to myself. It was indeed a question for the ages. The thought alone was ludicrous, absurd, impossible. And yet…
Oh, isn’t that the definition of science? The art of making the impossible possible.
I pulled up the geological timelines again, brushing a hand through my messy bun. The anomaly was at the precise layer of Earth’s crust that correlated with the era of the Troodon dinosaurs. An era where, according to the established norms of science, civilization as we define it today, was a mere gleam in the cosmic eye.
There is no such thing as a coincidence, Kiera, I reminded myself.
What I had in front of me was more than an anomaly. It was a door, creaking open to the unknown. It was a question mark against everything we thought we knew about the history of intelligence on Earth.
What I had in front of me was potentially the biggest discovery of the millennium.
Is it too early to start practicing my Nobel acceptance speech?
I stared at the blip again, my heart pounding like a drummer gone rogue. My mind wandered to the realms of the impossible, painting images of scaled, feathered creatures crafting tools, constructing dwellings, staring up at the stars with the same curiosity that I did.
Here be dragons, indeed.
And as the fluorescent lights of my tiny office flickered, casting an otherworldly glow on the static lines of data, I made my decision. This was too big to be swept under the rug of daily routines.
The world was about to be hit by a comet of knowledge, a comet of truth, a comet that might redefine the story of life on Earth. It was time to assemble a team, to embark on a year-long journey of discovery.
I drew in a breath, filled with anticipation and a tinge of apprehension. This was going to be interesting.
Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen.
And with a few quick keystrokes, I sent an email to the head of my department.
Subject: A Matter of Seismic Importance...
This prompt uses some of my own prompt in it, so I recognize the characteristic style. It’s a little over-the-top to the point of being hilariously bad at times (which is one reason why I enjoy it), but if you’re looking to tone it down then I suggest changing the “unique, sassy, ironic, sarcastic, and humorous voice” to just a “sarcastic and humorous voice.” That is what I’ve been doing lately, and the results have been much better. (By the way, the voice I was trying to emulate was Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels.)
One rookie mistake I see here and elsewhere in GPT-4′s writing is describing the POV character’s facial expressions. This is usually frowned upon in first-person and third-person limited POV because POV characters generally don’t perceive their own facial expressions unless they’re standing in front of a mirror. It’s better to say “I felt my cheeks burning” than “I blushed,” for example, because the former is truer of the POV character’s experiences.
If you want to try breaking GPT of these quasi-POV breaks, you could try adding a line about Deep POV, which is modern writing lingo for a highly immersive POV that stays completely in the POV character’s head. I would do it myself, but I don’t have access to GPT-4.