Disclaimer: This story was written collaboratively with GPT-2 (back in 2020). The contributions of the AI are the three fully italicised lines. See the note at the end for a discussion of the nature of early human-AI collaborative writing.
They were all gathered around that computer again. Huddled like campers around a neon blue campfire, waiting with bated breath for the next turn in the story. A sudden commotion - a mad blinking of status LEDs from racks of computers lining the walls - blue, red and green.
‘Look - it’s coming!’ (one of the junior detectives.) And indeed it was. As Detective Jim Frose walked over to stand behind the enraptured group, a clue was appearing on the screen:
‘Well, if your name comes up and you're looking at it, it makes perfect sense’
There were sighs and general sounds of deflation. It was another one of those clues. The ones which are so cryptic as to be essentially unusable. People began standing up from their positions around the screen, looks of disappointment on their faces, moving back to their desks and to the drudgery of whatever task had previously been occupying them.
‘What do you think Jim?’ Mehmoud was one of the only people in the department who seemed to value his input anymore. Frose looked again at the clue, narrowing his eyes to the glare from Mehmoud’s blue-white screen. Sometimes he felt like these clues were generated by picking random words out of hat, but Mehmoud assured him that behind it was an intricate system of logic too complicated for simple bags of flesh and bones like us to understand.
‘Not sure yet. I’ll have to mull it over.’
He left Mehmoud leaning back on his chair, a contemplative look on his face, and started down the starkly lit white hallway.
--
Frose sat in the passenger seat next to a weary-looking constable, driving down the freeway, out of the city towards the docks in Spotswood.
‘I hope you know what you’re talking about Detective, this is a lot of squad cars to be sending out on a hunch.’
Frose looked silently ahead at the light midday traffic on the road. He hated to admit it, but the AI Detective occasionally produced some gems. The last clue was almost poetic: at first glance a basic tautology, but digging deeper there were vital connections to the case. The techs had managed to crack the password on the victim’s phone, and had uploaded it’s contents to the AI. It turns out that right before she was killed, the victim had searched her own name on the internet, and among the top results was a page for the Yarraville Oil Terminal in Spotswood - a place seemingly completely unrelated to her life. Frose had a hunch that they were about to find more bad news here.
The constable took a long, curved off-ramp down from the freeway, and continued along the connecting arterial road before stopping in front of a set of high chain-link gates. Frose stepped out of the car and was approaching the gates when a voice behind him called out.
‘Detective Frose, how in the hell have you managed to sequester my entire division to follow you on some wild goose chase?’
He had hoped that Senior Sergeant Kilroy would not have thought it worth her time to attend today.
‘Senior Sergeant, I am merely following the advice of AID, which - I might add - you seem to have no problem doing when the clue is simple enough that it does not require my interpretation.’
He watched her face contort with indignation. ‘Well detective, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay out of the way of my officers while we secure the area.’
He made a placating gesture and turned to follow the officers now entering the property.
Together, they went through the buildings and warehouses, securing each one before they moved to the next. It was in the maintenance shed where they found the next body.
--
‘That was actually a half-decent clue last time.’
‘What have I been trying to tell you this whole time? They’re all decent clues. You-’ Mehmoud pointed his finger into Frose’s chest for emphasis, ‘just need to be smart enough to work out what it’s telling you.’
‘Right. Let’s give it another whirl then.’ The body they found at the oil terminal had yet to be identified. Finger prints, height, weight, eye and hair colour had all been given to the AI Detective, and Frose was surprised at his own anticipation to receive another clue.
The screen lit up. The indicator lights blinked. Red, green, blue. Another clue:
‘You were in your own living room now and looking over with someone else… you looked down at a couple of feet below.’
Whose living room? The original victim, or this new body, or someone else entirely? He hoped the feet in question were still attached to their owner.
--
Frose sat on his couch, staring at his feet, feeling ridiculous. It didn’t make any sense. Maybe it would help if he had someone to ‘look over’ with, whatever that meant. But alas, he was alone. What shoes were the two victims wearing? He sifted through the photos taken at the crime scenes, finding two which showed work boots and blood-stained white volleys.
He sighed and looked off the side, eyes inspecting the gaps between the newly stained hardwood floorboards. They were slightly too wide, which had always bugged him.
--
‘Can’t you just ask it who the murderer is, if it’s that smart?’
‘You know it doesn’t work like that, Jim. It accumulates evidence and tells us where it thinks we can find more.’
‘Surely the murderer is a piece of evidence?’
Mehmoud paused for a moment, then nodded his head in understanding and typed in the prompt:
‘Who is the murderer?’
A pause, then the words appeared on the screen:
‘Dude, Jim,’.
Mehmoud’s eyes widened and head snapped around to look at Frose.
‘I think your AI needs some more work, Mehmoud. My name’s come up, I’m looking at it, but it does not make the least bit of sense.’ His collar all of a sudden felt very tight.
Jim Frose was co-written in 2020 with GPT-2, a language generation AI developed by OpenAI. Each time the characters in the story received a clue from the AI Detective, this clue was in fact generated by GPT-2 by taking the entire story up until that point as a prompt.
This process of writing with GPT-2 was significantly different from the kind of human-AI collaboration afforded by contemporary chat bots. It demanded an improvisational style on my part, as I was not only forced to accept the generated phrases verbatim (including sometimes strange word and grammar choices,) but I could also not preplan the plot. Each time a new clue was generated, the story preceding it was fixed (else the clues would have to change.)