Introduction

OMG, this book! What a pain in the ass.

It started with good intentions. After I finished the first two books, which were both mainly my ideas, I asked ChatGPT if it had any cool sequel ideas. It suggested a story involving Neo-Vikings, the Lost City of Atlantis, and the Bermuda Triangle. I was like, 'Holy shit … let’s do it!'

The problem is, I wrote the first two books in one ChatGPT chat so that it could keep all of the Frank Baxter books in mind. By the time I was done with the second book, it took a solid 60 seconds just to open the chat. Writing a page took FIVE MINUTES at a time. It was funny how frustrated I was that a robot was taking five whole minutes to write 500 words at a time, but I was frustrated nonetheless. So, halfway through this book, I fired up another chat, fed it chapter-by-chapter summaries of the first two books and then the entirety of what I had written so far of the third.

And then I got greedy.

ChatGPT gave me a bunch of creative feedback for what I had already written, so I was like, 'Well, go ahead and fix it! Hell, you wrote the damned thing!' And so it re-outlined the second half of the book. This was a good idea at the time, but looking at it now, I realize you shouldn’t re-outline a ChatGPT book halfway through writing a ChatGPT book. That’s why the antagonist goes by 'the Viking Leader' in the beginning of the book and is then introduced as Erik in the second half, among other silly things.

There’s a LOT of wandering around the Arctic under an aurora borealis in this one. I’m not sure how it flew off the outline so much. There was supposed to be a lot more of the Bermuda Triangle and Baywatch-y type stuff in there, but ChatGPT wanted to stick with parkas, strongholds, and snowmobiles. It is what it is.

The images were also kinda funky this time around. It REALLY wanted to give Frank a mustache or beard throughout, to the point that I had to adjust the prompt that Frank is a CLEAN-SHAVEN, fedora-clad detective. So if you see Frank with a ‘stache, that’s why.

Woo wee. I’m worn out. I pretty much did these things back-to-back over the period of two weeks, and I’m pretty burned out for now, but can’t wait to dig back into using AI to create long-form stories.

There are still a LOT of limitations with AI, and it’s certainly no Quentin Tarantino when crafting a story. As I’ve said before, these three books were weird experiments to see what an action-adventure novel looked like from the mind of AI. The next stories I make, I’m going to try to make actually good and compelling narratives that connect with humans.

See you then!

-Jimmy