The Zalachete Fairy is the 72nd book in the AI lore series, by Canadian AI publisher, Lost Books. It’s the first book in this series to use GPT-4, which was released publicly yesterday.

I used both GPT-3 and 3.5 extensively and penned many books in this series using those models. I can confidently say after comparing the experience and results given me by this model that GPT-4 is radically better at working as a writing partner – at least for the style of writing that I do, heavy on the exposition & lore. I previously did not think that ChatGPT Plus was worth the $20 a month, but I have changed my mind now that this includes priority access to 4.

The way I started using it is by introducing that we will work on fictional world building in a sci fi setting. I have it disable personal pronouns (and call itself “the model”) as well as apologies and disclaimers before I begin (though these seem possibly to be less problematic in this version). Then I give it a book title, tell it I want the format to be fictional encyclopedia entries, and then give it a summary.

In exchange, the model spit out for me five or six 1-2 paragraph encyclopedia entries, which were all reasonably good. Then I went through each entry, and told it to expand the entry, and add in some fact or twist I wanted it to incorporate. It did a great job with those, and I found the generated text to be much more creative, interesting, and far less repetitive than using a similar method in prior models would have yielded.

Then I had it just generate titles for five new entries, and had it expand each of those based on my instructions. I added a very small amount of extra stuff (mainly cross-references to other books) manually, did my usual thing with images from PlaygroundAI.com, and that was it.

I’ve found in the past that with ChatGPT I could produce lets say, around 2K mostly usable words in about an hour. In last night’s first try, I surpassed about 3.6K words of much higher quality and greater coherence in a little under 45 minutes. This is a major leap forward merely on the volume side, but add to that the increase in quality, and this is a major deal.

The book itself tells the story of a mysterious figure in ancient myth and legend which “some people” believe may have been an ancient artificially intelligence which arose spontaneously in nature. The name actually came from a dream just before waking, which left me with no other details of the story. With that simple premise of ancient AI, the actual today AI of GPT-4 had little problem turning it into a pretty entertaining little read.

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