Introduction
The Frank Baxter series is an experiment to see how artificial intelligence, specifically ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Midjourney, can be used when creating long form stories. It’s vital to understand that these books aren’t really written by me. All three books were my ideas and I “drove the car” throughout the process, but I contributed very little actual writing to these books. Again, it was simply to see the quality of work ChatGPT could produce when tasked with writing a book-length novel. What I’ve found is it’s basically like having an incredibly fast and efficient writing partner who takes direction easily. ChatGPT would tirelessly spit out pages, I’d barely read them, then give it angry and passionate notes on all of the things I didn’t like. At last, ChatGPT finally made me a real director!
The Silent Locket was written almost entirely by ChatGPT. It started with a simple outline which I reviewed and gave creative input to. That outline quickly turned into a very detailed outline which ChatGPT would use to create each page. After that, I mostly just let ChatGPT go, generating page-after-page, 500 words at a time. I would skim the outputs to make sure the book stayed on course with the outline and nothing went fully off the rails, but I didn’t read this book word-for-word, line-for-line as it was being written. The experiment was to see what ChatGPT could do on its own. So let’s see what its got!
Can ChatGPT create a compelling mystery? Can it set up moments in the beginning of the book and then pay it off 30,000 words later? Can it make you laugh, cry and fall in love?
Spoiler Alert – Not really. But it’s not bad!
Sure, there’s an extremely similar action sequence in Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 with nearly identical dialogue. Sure, some of the scenes kind of wander around. There are a lot of characters without names and none of the twists really pay off in any way. But there are a lot of things ChatGPT is great at!
And that’s why this book was created. Now that it’s finished, I’m putting it on my website for free for everyone to see and learn from it if they’re curious. Instead of using my newfound knowledge to rewrite the book and “make it better,” I moved on to the sequel. But we’ll get to that in the next book.
For most illustrations, ChatGPT would read a chapter and then Dall-E would render five images that represented key moments from that chapter. This allowed ChatGPT and Dall-E to “get creative” and “have fun with it.” Like most AI images at the time of their creation, they are a little wonky, but the cohesiveness between 75+ illustrations is incredibly impressive. While some images are included because their weirdness is so entertaining, others are so striking I want to get prints made and hang them on my wall.
So check out The Silent Locket if you’re interested. Artificial Intelligence is a polarizing subject that makes some people angry. I’m simply experimenting with this stuff for fun and hope people have fun with it too.
Enjoy!
-Jimmy
