Gail Carriger was our special guest in the latest episode of The World of Steampunk, our YouTube video series. In our “Steampunk Minute” segment, she discussed her plans for the first half of 2023, plus her recent books and her foray into self-publishing.
Lately, she’s branched out from steampunk into other subgenres of science fiction and fantasy, but she told us that readers can still expect more stories set in her Parasolverse.
The episode also features a special report on generative AI and what it means for steampunk culture. We recently covered the topic in a pair of articles, but the episode allowed us to do it in a more visual way.
As we’ve stated, our policy is to avoid use of AI-generated content unless it’s to illustrate the topic, and that’s what we did in this report. Previously, we posed questions to ChatGPT, the AI-based chatbot, to gauge its knowledge of steampunk, and posted the exchange as a Q&A.
For the video report, we decided to present a portion of that same Q&A as an on-screen interview. First, we used Listnr, an AI-based text-to-speech generator, to convert part of the interview into spoken words. Then we used Midjourney to create a steampunk robot that served as a personification of ChatGPT. We added some animation effects to make it appear that the robot was thinking and talking. This gave us an on-screen character to speak the words.
We also recorded other interactions with ChatGPT to show how it works. We conducted the original Q&A in mid-January, but the screen recordings in the video were recorded later with the Jan. 30 version of the software.
On a lark, we decided to make some ridiculous requests of ChatGPT, and the AI dutifully responded. In the video, you’ll see it compose an essay on the role of turnips in the rise of Western Civilization. We also asked it to write a song about a young man’s love for turnips.
Not seen is our request for a short story about an AI that conquers the world but is defeated by turnips. In response, ChatGPT wrote a story in which people discover that the AI is allergic is turnips and grow them to thwart its robots. So if an AI does conquer the world and we find ourselves with a global turnip shortage, you’ll know whom to blame.
