As you’ve heard, ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence text generator that is quite good at understanding English language prompts, and surprisingly not bad at generating plausible-sounding, but often inaccurate and seldom if ever insightful responses. The AI doesn’t exactly understand what it is saying, so much as it has already read colossal amounts of human-generated online text and can string words together that go together without being exactly plagiarism, at a kind of an A minus high school student prose style level.

The more informative you make the prompt, the more intelligent the response sounds as it feeds your own question back to you. For example, I just finished reading a moderately famous century-old novel, Aldous Huxley’s debut novel, Crome Yellow, which is reasonably good if you don’t expect a plot—it’s more like a collection of amusing short stories told by the guests at the country mansion of Crome, kind of like the Decameron. So I asked ChatGPT:

Q. Who are the real life individuals the characters in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow—such as Denis, Mr. Scogan, Ann, Mrs. Wimbush, Gombuuld, Mary Bracegirld, and Mr. Barbecue-Smith—are based upon?

A. It is not clear whether the characters in Aldous Huxley’s novel “Crome Yellow” are based on real-life individuals. Huxley was known for his wit and satire, and it is possible that the characters in “Crome Yellow” are fictional creations rather than representations of real people. It is also possible that the characters may be based on a combination of real and fictional elements, or that they may be inspired by people Huxley knew or encountered in his life. Without further information, it is difficult to say for certain whether the characters in “Crome Yellow” are based on real-life individuals.

Well, that’s pretty lousy.

But I repeatedly gave ChatGPT more informative prompts and pretty soon it was spitting back pretty decent responses:

“Q. The 1921 novel “Crome Yellow” by Aldous Huxley is famous as a roman a clef poking fairly gentle fun at a number of prominent Bloomsbury figures and other progressive intellectual personalities of early 20th Century Britain. Is Mr. Scogan, the brilliant, conceited, and lecherous older character, who offers science fiction-like predictions about how children in the future will be gestated in glass bottles and born into biological castes, the basis for Huxley’s “Brave New World,” based upon science fiction writer H.G. Wells, philosopher Bertrand Russell, Capri-based travel writer Norman Douglas, or Huxley’s older brother, biologist Julian Huxley?

“A. According to some sources, Mr. Scogan in Aldous Huxley’s novel “Crome Yellow” is believed to be based on Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, mathematician, and social reformer. Mr. Scogan is described as a brilliant, conceited, and lecherous older character who offers science fiction-like predictions about the future, and it is possible that Huxley drew inspiration from Russell’s intellectual and philosophical interests in creating this character. It is worth noting that different sources may present slightly different interpretations of the real-life individuals that the characters in “Crome Yellow” are based on, and it is possible that Huxley may have drawn inspiration from multiple sources in creating the character of Mr. Scogan.”

On the other hand, I did most of the work in ChatGPT coming up with this latter response, so I’m not sure what I got out of this. I kind of feel like a teacher having a dialogue with a quite clever and facile but only superficially knowledgeable student.

It’s widely asserted that this kind of text generating AI will replace search engines, but so far I don’t see the advantage over the output of Google 20 years ago. The anti-plagiarism policy means it’s not presenting the best answer but instead is presenting a mediocre one.

OK, here’s my next extremely elaborate prompt:

“Q. The 1921 novel “Crome Yellow” by Aldous Huxley is famous as a roman a clef poking fairly gentle fun at a number of prominent Bloomsbury figures and other progressive intellectual personalities of early 20th Century Britain. Is Mr. Scogan, the brilliant, conceited, and lecherous older character, who offers science fiction-like predictions about how children in the future will be gestated in glass bottles and born into biological castes, the basis for Huxley’s “Brave New World,” based upon science fiction writer H.G. Wells, philosopher Bertrand Russell, Capri-based travel writer Norman Douglas, or Huxley’s older brother, biologist Julian Huxley? Personally, I think Mr. Scogan is most derived from H. G. Wells, but my friend Mike says he’s based upon Sir Julian Huxley, while my friend Elizabeth says Mr. Scogan is Bertrand Russell. Please give me a good argument for why the character Mr. Scogan in Aldous Huxley’s “Crome Yellow” is modeled after H. G. Wells.

“A. It’s difficult to say for certain which specific person Mr. Scogan in “Crome Yellow” was based on, as Huxley likely drew inspiration from multiple sources when creating the character. However, there are some points that could be made in support of the idea that Mr. Scogan was based on H.G. Wells:

“Both Mr. Scogan and H.G. Wells were intellectuals and writers who were known for their innovative ideas and futuristic visions.

“In “Crome Yellow,” Mr. Scogan is described as a science fiction writer, which could be seen as a nod to H.G. Wells, who was a pioneering science fiction writer and is considered one of the fathers of the genre.

“Both Mr. Scogan and H.G. Wells were known for their progressive views and were involved in the intellectual and social movements of their time.

“Huxley and Wells were contemporaries and were part of the same social circle, so it’s possible that Huxley drew inspiration from Wells when creating the character of Mr. Scogan.

“Overall, while it’s impossible to say definitively that Mr. Scogan was based on H.G. Wells, these points suggest that Wells could have been a likely inspiration for the character.”

OK, so some of this is ChatGPT hallucinating: e.g., “In ’Crome Yellow,’ Mr. Scogan is described as a science fiction writer.” I strongly doubt that is true. Maybe I was falling asleep while reading the book, but I think I would have noticed a 1921 character being described as “a science fiction writer.” My guess is that ChatGPT is just agreeably making up nonsense to support my request.

On the other hand, it is doing a decent job of generating plausible-sounding verbiage in support of my theory. (Personally, I lean toward its previous Bertrand Russell theory, but the majority of online sources seem to go with H. G. Wells.)

I think the interesting epistemological question is why human beings are so easily fooled by ChatGPT’s parlor tricks.

By the way, my theory is that there is much back and forth influence between T.S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley, two scions of famous intellectual families. Huxley’s personal proxy character Denis, the awkward young poet frustrated by his inability to win the heart of society beauty Ann, is quite similar to the title character in Eliot’s 1915 poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” while 1921’s Crome Yellow has a bit of the flavor of Eliot’s subsequent 1922 poem “The Waste Land.” Indeed, one theory is Ann is based upon Mary Hutchinson (the other main candidate is Virginia Woolf), of whom both Huxley and Eliot were enamored for many years.

This is not to say that Eliot and Huxley liked each other: they tended to diss each other in their belles lettres.

In Crome Yellow, Mr. Scogan, the Russell-Wells horndog, volunteers to tell fortunes at the local fair dressed as the Sorceress Sesostris and abuses his position to assure a naive blonde that the fates have decreed that she will lose her virginity to an older man she will meet next Sunday at six on a certain path in the woods.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards.

Russell probably slept with Eliot’s mentally unstable first wife, so Eliot had reason to be sore at his former mentor when he was a philosophy grad student.

By the way, speaking of Sesotris/Sosotris, it seems like ChatGPT is passing up its most obvious commercial market: fortune-telling.

For example, I asked it:

“Will Kylie Jenner find true love in 2023?

“As an AI, I do not have the ability to predict the future or to know what will happen in someone’s personal life. It is not possible for me to predict whether Kylie Jenner will find true love in 2023 or at any other time.”