Plot twists: the rejected thesis of Kurt Vonnegut meets GPT-4

💫 "Man in a hole", "Boy meets girl" and other ideas too much fun for the University of Chicago

The University of Chicago didn’t like Kurt Vonnegut’s master thesis. According to the brilliant writer it was "too simple” and “too much fun” for the renowned institution 🙈.

🤖 Shape of a story (Midjourney)

Man in a hole

The idea was that stories have shapes. To see the shape of a story, plot how the main character is doing over time, giving high points for rainbows and unicorns and low points for despair and traffic jams.

Vonnegut’s insight was that common patterns tend to emerge from those charts, and that they reveal something about the society that creates and consumes these stories. In a rare preserved video lecture, he demonstrated a few classic story types. This, for example, is “The man in a hole”:

Someone gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love this story! Indeed, that’s the structure of such popular hits as the Count of Monte Christo or Lord of the Rings!

Boy meets girl

And here’s another one from the same lecture: Average day, average person, a day like any other. He finds something wonderful! Then oh damn it, loses it! Then gets it back again. People like that.

Hey computer, draw me a chart of the Lion King storyline

If you've been reading this newsletter for a while, you know where this is going :).

Yes, we’re going to explain the concept of story shapes to an AI assistant and see if they can draw plots representing some popular modern stories! In particular, we'll ask GPT-4 to draw the story shapes of the Lion King and the first Harry Potter book.

My query went like this:

Draw a chart representing the storyline progression of the movie "Lion king". The y axis should represent the situation of the protagonist (high representing positive emotions and situations, low representing danger, sadness or other negative emotions). The x axis should represent the progression of time.

I really wasn’t expecting this to work out of the box. How could it? And yet… First came the text response. The model correctly restates the request and then… breaks down the Lion King story into key points, assessing the situation of the main character at each step (in the screenshot I cut it early, the result had 10 points).

The model then generates the Python code that represents each of those points on a scale from 1 to 10:

The next step was a bit anticlimactic with some technical glitches:

But after a few retries…

Isn't it amazing and a little spooky that it just worked? All of this: from interpreting the story progression through generating the program, to running it and displaying the chart, was done by GPT-4 automagically.

The spookiness aside, doesn’t this chart resemble “The man in a hole”? Vonnegut was right, we really do love this story structure!

Harry Potter book 1

And here’s the GPT-4 take on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone:

Wait, that's the second of Vonnegut's patterns! The protagonist discovers something amazing (they're a wizard!) then things go bad (Voldemort is after them) and then things are fine again. 2 for 2 for the famous writer 🎯.

More on this

• 🔎 Anybody planning a trip to Indiana ? I'd love to reference Vonnegut's rejected thesis as the source material, but it doesn't seem to be available online. The trail leads to Indiana University's library, which is the custodian of the writer's papers. A Reddit search indicates that folders 24-25 of the Miscellaneous papers contain Thesis "Fluctuations Between Good and Ill Fortune in Simple Tales" written at the Writer's Workshop at University of Iowa, October, 1965. Four copies. (2 folders).

• 🎞️ Short video of Vonnegut charmingly explaining this stuff

Postcard from Medoc

This weekend I'm returning to Médoc for its famous wine marathon: 42 kilometers of running and 20+ different wines to try along the way 😋. By the time this newsletter is sent out I should be safely done, or happily lost in the vines 💫. (I'm scheduling this post to autosend on Sunday as I'm about to take the train. I took the photo above during my previous run in 2015 :))

Have a great week!
– Przemek