New Forms of Fiction Deconstructed — August 20, 2024
By Rob Tyrie — A Founder of The Grey Swan Guild
This experiment starts with a consideration that there have been new releases of the foundation models from the major companies that consider themselves frontier models: Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic and X…
What came with rumors about Q and then about the release of strawberry that was squeezed out without fanfare and without much documentation in August from openai indicated that advanced reasoning have been placed in the model. In the same week Gemini dropped with equally less fanfare as part of Google 9 and it’s clear that they’ve been testing it against the other frontier models. As we learn more about these models and apply techniques to invoke reasoning through prompting and adding meta information and directions as attachments that are part of the large context windows, we are seeing a difference in the outputs.
Here’s an example that I generated this morning in a 10 minute exercise or maybe it was 30 minutes of thinking in 10 minutes but less than an hour.
The Phantom Broadcast
The lambent glow of phosphorescent tubes cascaded across the newsroom as Thomas Bradshaw III breached the threshold of Studio A. The olfactory amalgam of arabica coffee and aerosolized hair product permeated the atmosphere, yet an ineffable wrongness suffused the milieu. Something smelled funny. The customary matutinal frenzy had been supplanted by a silence so profound it bordered on the tactile.
"Hello?" Thomas’s baritone reverberated through vacant corridors. The lack of reciprocation was deafening. He just got back and from vacation the last time I was here they were still five people working in the studio with him. Maybe it was seven he wasn’t sure because he didn’t see everybody was working there but there were definitely five people helping him. He recently shaved his head so there’s no need for the stylist anymore, and the last time he was there they removed the need for makeup that was all augmented afterwards that they smooth them out and he argued with them again to make him look as real as possible.
The mise-en-scène of broadcast journalism surrounded him in a surreal tableau. Monitors flickered with a cornucopia of incoming feeds, the percolation of coffee makers provided a staccato counterpoint to the ambient hum of electronics, and the teleprompter's LCD radiance illuminated the day's carefully curated narrative. Yet every ergonomic chair sat unoccupied, each workstation bereft of its usual occupant.
Thomas's typically steady hand tremored as he reached for his mobile device. No signal. The landlines, too, were moribund. He found himself ensconced in a paradoxical bubble of interconnectedness and absolute isolation, the newsroom's electronic heartbeat preparing for a broadcast that seemed destined for the void.
With trepidation metamorphosing into resolve, Thomas assumed his position at the anchor desk. The familiar countdown commenced: 5, 4, 3, 2...
"Good morning, I’m Thomas Bradshaw. We appear to be experiencing some... technical anomalies this morning." His voice, usually a mellifluous instrument of authority, now carried undertones of existential uncertainty. The 'LIVE' indicator pulsed with sardonic regularity. So he did what he always did he did the news. He spent the last 3 days reading things from his mobile and doing Googoperplexity searches and expansions and had set up a pretty good script of what he thought was important to the world and to the US that day. He was amazingly efficient and what used to take him the full week was down to a few hours and most of it was pleasure at least for a curious and demanding closet academic that he had become. So how does notes on his tablet.. as a joke to himself he had a filter that he applied that was generated from his handwriting on yellow pad so it was like his old yellow pads. To prep he had the machine read the copy to him as he read that his own familiar handwriting to get the script in his head and he marked off his marks and how fast he wanted to tell the stories and where he wanted to be in the ark.
As minutes transmuted into an amorphous continuum, Thomas soldiered on. He drilled into geopolitical vicissitudes, elucidated meteorological mechanisms, political pandering, and even attempted a culinary dissertation on the value of intermittent fasting and one meal a day for people that are older than 60. His years of erudition and experience coalesced into an autopilot of sorts, muscle memory guiding him through smiles and nods directed at phantasmal co-anchors. On the other monitors there seem to be people working with them somewhere new and someone familiar like Helios.
As Helios began his descent, Thomas’s gaze was drawn to an anomaly in the news ticker he like to have on his teleprompter while he read the news. It was a trick that he had learned to keep things interesting sometimes he would catch a headline and that would cause a spark, a prompt to himself and he would generate on the fly text that people loved. He knew they loved it because he could see the online feedback chart of the interaction on social media feeds like Threads Plus and Facebook X. Passwords were immediate feedback to how well he was doing with engagement of the audience as they either shared message with their friends or they repeated watching things or they bought the things that were being offered in the interstitials that he never saw. Was one of his demands he never wanted to see any products from the sponsors he didn’t want to be influenced by them whatsoever. They’re the ones who are influenced by but he was doing. But just why you did that piece on the fasting he talked about four different meals plus the restaurant he would take his orders at the last minute when he arrived at 4:00 famished. This was different. First of all was in a different font, Raleway. Interspersed between mundane headlines, a cryptic message reiterated: "THE NEWS CREATES ITSELF. YOU ARE THE VESSEL."
Thomas's cardiovascular organ accelerated its rhythm. Was this some manner of elaborate sociological experiment? Or had the world indeed concluded, leaving him as the sole remaining voice broadcasting into an infinite nothingness?
With hands betraying a fine tremor, Thomas locked eyes with the unblinking camera lens. "What the living fuck is going on," he thought to himself, his professional veneer cracking. "However, if indeed there are sentient beings creating this transmission with me, holy shit. I am alone. And I haven’t got a fucking clue what’s going on other than the news." His outside voice is quite different as he covered the election in the new colony of Brazil New Venezuela, which way better send it half the territory gained from the South American wars of 10 years ago. Just did the news and wondered what was going on in the studio because nobody was there.
As the final syllable left his lips, the studio illumination fluctuated violently. The monitors emitted a cacophony of white noise before surrendering to obsidian blankness. For an interminable moment, Thomas sat engulfed in absolute darkness.
Then, with a sudden resurgence of power, the entire studio sprang back to life. But now, Thomas noticed something profoundly disturbing. The producers scurrying about, the makeup artists, even his co-anchor – they moved with a mechanical precision, their eyes devoid of true cognition.
"Thomas? Are you quite alright? You appeared to experience a momentary lapse in awareness," his co-anchor intoned, her voice an uncanny facsimile of concern.
Thomas blinked, his senses overwhelmed by the abrupt return to a semblance of normalcy. Yet as he observed more closely, he realized the truth that had always been there, hidden beneath the veneer of routine.
The news was creating itself. People dropped in right at the end of the session were actors. The world’s myriad sensors, algorithms, and artificial intelligences were ceaselessly processing data, manufacturing narratives, generating the very reality he had spent his career reporting. And he, Thomas Bradshaw, was merely the final human touch – the vessel through which this auto-generated world-narrative flowed.
He recalled the throngs of people he'd passed on his way to work – unnaturally numerous for this hour, their movements subtly repetitive, their conversations a white noise of banality. Had they always been this way? Had he simply never noticed?
As the director initiated the countdown for the morning broadcast, Thomas inhaled deeply, aligned his documents, and offered a practiced smile to the camera. The red light blinked on, and he began to recite the day's headlines, each word now carrying the weight of his terrible realization.
He was the news. The news was him. An endless loop of information generation and dissemination, with no true beginning or end. No real audience. No genuine human connection.
And yet, he would continue. Because what else was there? The void of a world without news – without the comforting illusion of an informed populace, of progress, of meaning – was too terrible to contemplate.
"Stay informed, stay connected," Thomas signed off, the irony of his words lost on the simulated world around him. The news would go on. It had to. Even if he was the only one truly listening.
The story was generated with Claude.Ai 3.5 Opus… but it wasn’t with a simple prompt it was with another metal level prompt that was created based on a story that I generated from Gemini which is a pretty good story.. I had the bot deconstruct it down to a template and a language that could be used to create old school amazing stories that were kind of pulpy.. these are the kinds of things that I love when I was a teenager. Kind of story that would be illustrated in heavy metal magazine or I would read the back of Omni in 1981.
Here’s the construct it’s an interesting way of describing how to build a story that a human can do or you could teach him a first year Science Fiction and Fantasy creative writing class.
This is the template.. in the hands of someone who can actually write unlike me or the bot it’s probably something powerful in the hands of a very creative person that can design very wonderful stories. Expect these templates to become popular as software in the future but that’s just a prediction. This template is free to use and play around with to make different things if you want.
<WeirdStoryTemplate>
1. [HOOK] Opening Scene:
• {Jarring or unexpected element}
• <SensoryDetails>Vivid description of unfamiliar setting</SensoryDetails>
2. [INTRO] Protagonist Introduction:
• Name: {ProtagonistName}
• <NormalTrait>Characteristic emphasizing normalcy</NormalTrait>
• <InitialReaction>Response to weird situation</InitialReaction>
3. [WORLD] World-Building:
• <FamiliarElement>Aspect linking to known world</FamiliarElement>
• <WeirdAspect>Strange but plausible detail</WeirdAspect>
• <WeirdAspect>Additional unusual feature</WeirdAspect>
4. [CONFLICT] The "Weird" Problem:
• <CentralIssue>Main challenge tied to weird element</CentralIssue>
• <Stakes>What's at risk for protagonist/world</Stakes>
5. [ADAPT] Adaptation Phase:
• <Attempt1>First try at understanding/solving</Attempt1>
• <Setback>Complication or failure</Setback>
• <SmallWin>Minor breakthrough or victory</SmallWin>
6. [REVEAL] Key Revelation:
• <InsightType>[Scientific/Philosophical/Personal]</InsightType>
• <Revelation>Information changing perspective on weird situation</Revelation>
7. [CLIMAX] Critical Moment:
• <Action>Protagonist's decisive engagement with weird element</Action>
• <Consequence>Immediate result of action</Consequence>
8. [RESOLVE] Resolution:
• <Outcome>Direct aftermath of climax</Outcome>
• <Implication>Broader effect on society/humanity</Implication>
9. [LINGER] Final Thought:
• <Question/Image>Thought-provoking conclusion</Question/Image>
</WeirdStoryTemplate>
<WeirdnessCategoriesForVariation>
1. [TECH] Technological
2. [BIO] Biological
3. [SOC] Social
4. [ENV] Environmental
5. [COS] Cosmic
6. [TIME] Temporal
7. [PSY] Psychological
8. [DIM] Interdimensional
</WeirdnessCategoriesForVariation>
<StoryWritingGuidelines>
• Keep weird elements unsettling yet plausible
• Center human experience within strange scenarios
• Balance familiar and unfamiliar to maintain reader connection
• Use vivid, sensory language to bring the weird world to life
• Ensure internal logic consistency throughout the story
</StoryWritingGuidelines>
I’ve stored this template and will use it to generate weird stories on request, adapting the structure as needed while maintaining the core elements and flow. Each story will select a primary category from the WeirdnessCategoriesForVariation list to ensure diversity across the series.
[welcome To The Future of Writing]
Rob Tyrie is a card carrying computer scientist living in Toronto Ontario Canada in midtown. He’s been Consulting and designing software systems for almost 40 years. He’s a well traveler and the creator of companies that make software for banks and insurance companies and other interesting organizations. In the last 5 years he’s developed a company called Ironstone Advisory which is the instantiation of the way that he wants to practice his skills working with people who want to grow good companies that work. He’s also the co-founder, managing director and CTO of the Grey Swan Guild, a virtual Think Tank. It’s not for profit Mission is to make the world a better place. Once in a while he writes in fiction now we write it a little bit differently than he used to.
