This story is a collaboration between humans and AIs. The text is from an experiment in collaborative storytelling from
a code jam at OpenAI in 2018 -- some lines were written by humans and others were written by a language model
(an early version of GPT) -- I've lost track of who wrote which. A genetic
algorithm moderated.
The images were generated by Dall-e 2 with the given text as prompts. I also prepended
"A pastel illustration of bees: " to each prompt.
The storytelling experiment was run by Peter Zhokhov, Alex Nichol, Elena Chatziathanasiadou, and Phillip Isola. The human storytellers were
various people at OpenAI in 2018. The language model was trained on innumerable other human authors, and Dall-e
was likewise trained on the data of innumerable artists. I, Phillip, ran Dall-e on the text and curated the generated images
from multiple samples.
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Once upon a time, there was a beehive that produced the most delicious and most golden honey in the entire universe... |
But lately, something strange had been happening -- the bees had been sleeping long past the usual end of their winter slumber |
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and, by the time they wake up, there is not a single flower left in the forest except the flowers of an extremely spicy pepper plant! |
They found out that someone was drugging them! Ohhh my....drugged bees is the most hilarious spectacle to watch! | ![]() |
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Their buzzzzzing orchestra was completely off key....and their beeezzz dancing was crazier than ever! |
but, oh how they did dance! There was so much dancing that you couldn't make it out! It was like they had a life of their own | ![]() |
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and, in some mysterious way, they were happy |