It pays to know your enemy, so before writing this piece I prompted the free version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT software to probabilistically derive a short article in the style of Edwin Evans-Thirlwell from the years of my writing OpenAI have scraped and processed without my consent.
The client clipped together a fair approximation of a self-aggrandising lefty writer with a privileged education and a tendency to wank up his intros, but I didn’t think the output read much like me. Too crisp and Powerpointed, too figured-out, too composed. Still, perhaps the fault lay with the imprecise ‘engineering’ of my prompts.
