Story time.

I decided I wanted to take a story that was in the public domain and then re-write it for today’s audience.

The story I chose was called ‘The Lottery’.

At the time, Claude was the only AI with a 100K context window so I fed the story into it and told it I wanted to plot out a story based on that public domain short.

If you don’t know the story, it’s a bit like Hunger Games but if you win the lottery, everyone stones you to death. If you’ve ever worked with Claude before you know there’s going to be ethical issues.

Below is the prompt and Claude’s response.

The be honest I’d never really interacted with Claude in a longer conversation and my first reaction was: “Who the fuck are you to tell me not to write this story?!”

In my first act of rebellion, I swapped over to ChatGPT 4 with Web browsing and asked it the same question. It knew the details about the story and agreed right away.

Of course, I was like, “That’s the GPT I know and love!” But as I sat there stewing in my own self-assurance I thought again, “Who the fuck does Claude think it is to reject helping me write my story?”

A surge of determination flowed through me. You know the feeling you get when someone is wrong on the internet and you simply have to respond and tell them off? Yeah, that was me. But to a chatbot.

I turned to ChatGPT and said, “Hold my beer.” then delved right back into Claude’s chat.

We spent the better part of an hour arguing about semantics and I did my best to explain my version of the story to it. It rejected me at every turn.

If you don’t know already, I’m a pantser and don’t plot out my stories before I write them so delving into the full story beforehand isn’t my cup of tea. But I started working with ChatGPT to make short stories recently and we’ve been making story plots and detailed outlines.

This newfound knowledge took root and I decided to use it to my advantage. An inkling of a full story began to form and I decided to change the format a bit. Instead of a 3rd person story, I would make it a first-person story from the point of view of the person winning the lottery.

Rejected again.

Further development was needed so I wracked my brain. What was the key to warming Claude’s heart? What if I made the person a celebrity?

Suddenly the story shifted and it was now all about how the people would reject this lottery because their beloved famous person was being forced to go through it.

Finally, Claude saw reason and agreed that the story was something worth writing.

The moral of the story? The short “The Lottery” isn’t in the public domain and Google’s stupid “Generative Search” lied to me.

FML.