Lust and Pain in the Palace of Lies

From OpenArt

I wrote this 2,000 word short story as a dark satire on mysterious government agencies whose optimal recruits are those with Dissociative Identity Disorder. Think unempathic, callous, impervious to pain, low arousal - yet also competent, smart and on-mission.

We follow the final (virtual reality) assessment of such a trainee. I was trying for psychological horror, penetrating such a state of mind and a twist. I was also very interested to see whether the current batch of LLM AIs could add some value to my draft.

Here was the prompt: Please edit and improve the short story I will present in the next post. Keep the length about the same but improve the literary quality. Also accentuate, if possible, the haunting psychological dissociation, depersonalization and derealisation experienced by the protagonist.

Bard flatly refused to consider it. Its neo-Victorian guardrails simply blew a fuse - I suspect the title was enough. Booksie’s Bob was made of sterner stuff and produced a version which was 25% shorter, mostly by bowdlerising the material and failing to grasp the centrality and ambiguity of the protagonist’s psychological reality and the VR setting. Some of the detailed descriptive material was valuable, however, so I revised and incorporated that into the final version here (two or three paragraphs, including the first and last).

My conclusion. The current public AIs are ring-fenced against adult material, whether sexually somewhat-explicit or featuring scenes of torture or horror, even if implicit. They do not comprehend the overall plot, particularly if it’s sophisticated, ambiguous or setting up a twist. However, like a super-thesaurus, the AI-edited version is currently useful for feedback and detail. Might work better for children’s stories if they were bland and uplifting (!).

But things will only get better.

My domestic critic, who read both versions, said that she didn’t like my story: “Why do you never write about nice people doing nice things?” she said.

Next time, I told her.

Here's a link to the story.