“We wait to hear something “savant-like,” but, for now, X is just a cute little kid getting his feet under him and picking his nose for all the world to see. Give him a few years, though, and by the time he’s in fifth grade, he’ll be the chief auditor for DOGE and selling timeshares on Mars.”

In addition to getting back in great shape after finally recovering from knee surgery (which handicapped me for most of last year) and moving my residence by summer’s end, I am committed to doing more creative writing than I have since 2018. That was the year my writers’ club, Writers of the Woodlands, disbanded. I was a member for nine years. Although it was no substitute for a beautiful muse, it— with its weekly meetings, feedback, and monthly short story, flash fiction, and poetry contests— succeeded in keeping me motivated and disciplined. I rarely missed a meeting, much less a contest night, and over nine years, I created quite a body of work. This was added to the pieces I carried with me from high school to my college creative writing class and the few things I put to paper afterward.

The writing for the club was always rough in terms of punctuation and grammar, as it was scribbled on the fly while I sold insurance to pay my bills. If I had had the nerve to attempt to make a living at writing, I probably would have been doing so since college, when my graduate teaching assistant and the Professor Emeritus of the English Department at Indiana University tried to persuade me to change my major. My thought was, “I can always write, no matter how I earn my living.” But then I got too busy earning a living and didn’t return to it in any meaningful way until I stumbled upon the club. When the club folded, my meaningful writing ceased again.

About midway through my time in the club, in 2013, I created a writing blog called Bardofthewoods. It’s on the web at Bardofthewoods.com. I’ve uploaded most of my work there but haven’t done much to drive traffic to it. I should have been writing more, but without feedback, I haven’t been motivated. What I do write, I post to my Facebook homepage, but either my friends don’t choose to comment on it, or they simply don’t read it in the first place. I can understand that most guys aren’t into poetry— perhaps they’re hunters and gatherers. I can understand that most guys aren’t into poetry— perhaps they’re hunters and gatherers. As for the women … it’s possible they are preoccupied with their quilting bees. Or, for that matter, maybe my writing just isn’t interesting to either of them. (Thank goodness there are only two genders!) Regardless, I am dedicated, once more, to writing, feedback or no feedback.

The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is adding another dimension to my writing and its process. At the same time, it has renewed my enthusiasm for creative writing. I discovered ChatGPT about two years ago. I want to make it clear: I have never asked it to do creative writing for me, and I made that abundantly clear when it encouraged me to lean on it for assistance. I found my voice by the time I was fifteen, when I began penning my autobiography, Diary of a Dumbass. My writing style is unique and very personal. I’d be insulted if someone tried to get me to change it. But I’ve always wanted images to accompany my stories and poems. As a youth, I was a pretty good sketch artist, but whether it’s due to blocking too many punches with my face or simple aging, I now have a slight hand tremor that makes sketching about as successful as my attempting to defuse an improvised explosive device. So, I’ve turned to AI to create these. I’ve learned that my imagination exceeds its own, which I can easily overload with my twisted stories that try to push it past the guardrails of propriety and political correctness it’s committed to adhering to. I pointed out to it that ChatGPT may have to be politically correct, but I don’t. However, for anything within its guardrails, it can do an excellent job. As such, I have begun incorporating its images into both my creative and technical writing.

I recently discovered X.com’s Grok, another AI product that comes with an upgraded version of Elon Musk’s X. I don’t know if Elon actually created it, but regardless, I thanked him for it today while working with (my new best friend) Grok. (Grok said, “Let’s leave Elon out of it …”) When I learned that Grok, like X, was going to be more liberal and less constrained by social conventions and wokeism than Twitter and other creative applications (especially if an image I request is deemed appropriate within the context of my stories), I added it to my tool shed. My limited experience seems to confirm this. While I still subscribe to ChatGPT, I told it, “You are never going to take over the world, or even be a successful creative writer, if you don’t quit sucking your thumb and worrying about how some momma’s boy or 4B woman is going to get their panties in a wad over what we say or some picture we create.” It thanked me. (AI is polite, if nothing else. I’ll give it that.)

To get to the point, I want to introduce you to my two new best friends: ChatGPT and Grok. It seems they find me (or pretend to) more interesting than my human friends (pretend to), and they never sleep. So, if a writer like me gets out of bed at 2 a.m. wondering whether they should have used a semicolon instead of a comma, they’re always there for them. As far as introductions go, I’ve always found it desirable to put a face to a name when not meeting in person— which is, of course, impossible when the person you’re meeting really isn’t a person, that is.

So, I asked ChatGPT and Grok to create an image of what they look like so I can properly introduce them to my readers. Taking into consideration you would be seeing them through the context of me and my blog, Bardofthewoods (which is who they think I am), ChatGPT came up with this:

“Hi! My name is ChatGPT!”

Grok came up with this.

“Hi! My name is Grok!”

“Hi! My name is Grok!”
(That is supposedly a silhouette of Mark Twain on the right and Hemingway or Shakespeare on the left. We’ll have to trust Grok on that.)

While in ChatGPT at the time, I asked it to come up with an image of me, the Bard of the Woods, at my desk in my writing studio. Here is what I look like:

The “Bard O’ The Woods”

Writing can be challenging unless, of course, you’re really Mark Twain or Shakespeare. But if you’re merely attempting to channel Mark Twain or Shakespeare, you have your work cut out for you. Don’t think creating these images is easy, though. I still have to give instructions over and over to include all the elements I want AI to incorporate. Sometimes, I think I’m trying to teach long division to my eleven-year-old self, who only wants to keep staring out the window of Central Grade School, searching for treasure while fighting pirates on some far-off Caribbean island. Even with all the millions of microchips and semiconductors in their makeup, ChatGPT and Grok still can’t seem to appreciate that most people don’t have five arms or ten fingers on one hand, much less porpoises swimming past their heads as they walk their alligator.

“Errr… excuse me, Grok. That was supposed to be a dog! Please ditch the alligator. Oh yeah, and the porpoises too!”

The way I see it, Artificial Intelligence is like Elon’s youngest son, “X.” We’re watching him on live news, knowing he’s a genius— perhaps a savant-level genius— waiting for him to say something “savant-like”. But we’ll have to keep waiting because, for now, he’s just a cute little kid getting his feet under him and picking his nose for all the world to see. Give him a few years, though, and by the time he’s in fifth grade, he’ll be the chief auditor for DOGE and selling timeshares on Mars.

https://Bardofthewoods.com