Benny the Blue Whale: A Descent into Story, Language and the Madness of ChatGPT

AI is changing the world at frightening speed. A bestselling author decides to find out more…

Is ChatGPT the end of creative industries as we know them? An ethical quagmire from which there is no return? A threat to all our jobs, as we keep hearing on the news?

Bestselling children’s author Andy Stanton has made a career out of writing differently – from the unconventional ‘hero’ of his bestselling Mr Gum series to his penchant for absurdist plots, his children’s books are anything but formulaic.

When a friend introduces him to ChatGPT, the new large language chatbot, Andy is as sceptical as he is curious. Can this jumble of algorithms really mimic the spontaneity of human thought? Could it one day replace human authors like him for good? And are we soon to be ruled over by despotic robot overlords?

He decides there’s only one thing for it – he must test this bot’s capabilities. Eventually, he settles on a prompt that will push the algorithm to its creative limits: ‘tell me a story about a blue whale with a tiny penis.’

Chaos ensues.

What follows is a surprising and illuminating battle between Andy and ChatGPT that maybe, just maybe, might help us all understand AI a little bit better. Join Andy and his beleaguered AI lackey on a rollicking metafictional journey through the art of storytelling. Presenting his prompts and the AI-generated narrative alongside extensive commentary, Stanton provides a startling paean to the art of a good story and boundless human creativity. Hopeful and hilarious, Benny the Blue Whale provides a joyfully anarchic meditation on AI, literature and why we write.

Andy Stanton is the author of the bestselling Mr Gum series. He studied English at Oxford but they kicked him out. He lives in North London and has been a film script reader, a cartoonist, an NHS lackey and lots of other things.