So I was killing time at the airport last week, waiting on my flight. Grabbed lunch and sat down to start doom scrolling my phone since I had a couple of hours to kill. Then I thought…”Wait, I’m trying out the ChatGPT+ premium membership this month.”

I really….really need to share with you what this AI built for me with some simple prompting, all on my iPhone while I had lunch. Even the pdf I’m going to share, with the front and back covers. All of it.

On. My. Phone. During lunch.

Anyway, our policy is to consider AI as powerful tools but to always call out their usage. This is for pure entertainment. Nobody’s selling you anything here.

So I always read back in the 70’s and 80’s that “computers can’t create”, and imagination is the skill of the future. I hear it a lot now, actually, that AI is blobbing existing works together and creating nothing new, and that’s technically true. But that’s also what our brains do.

“All you need to invent is an imagination and a pile of junk.”Thomas Edison

It’s one thing to see the lyrics of an imaginary Bruce Springsteen song, like “Turn The Engine Over”:

I was born on the edge of a steel town flame,
Where the smokestacks whisper your daddy’s name.
Mama lit candles, prayed hard through the storm,
While the foreman shouted, “Son, that’s just how you’re born.”
The rail yard’s rusted, the bar lights dim,
But I still see her dancin’ like a seraphim.
[Chorus]
Turn the engine over, feel the rattle in your bones,
Roll past the ghosts that call these back roads home.
Love don’t die, it just hides out in the dust,
So turn the engine over, babe—
Drive it like you still believe in us.
[Verse 2]
Jenny worked nights down at Jackson’s Grill,
Saved up dimes in a jar on the windowsill.
She said, “Someday, I’ll see the ocean tide,”
But dreams like that don’t get no free ride.
I was too scared to run, too proud to beg,
Now her name’s a tattoo on my right leg.
[Chorus]
Turn the engine over, feel the thunder in your chest,
Every mile a mercy, every town a test.
The past don’t sleep, it rides in the rearview dust—
So turn the engine over, babe—
Drive it like you still believe in us.
[Bridge]
We were kings of the lot, gods of the drag,
Laughin’ through summers in American rags.
Now I punch clocks just to quiet my mind,
But some nights I hear her, singin’ soft through the pines…
[Verse 3]
Now my hands are blistered, my boots are worn,
I’ve buried too much to mourn like I’m torn.
But this old Ford’s got one more ride,
And maybe redemption waits on the other side.
[Final Chorus]
So turn the engine over, let it roar like it’s alive,
This heart’s still beatin’ like it’s twenty-five.
Hope ain’t gone, it’s just buried in the dust—
So turn the engine over, babe—
Drive it like you still believe in us.
[Outro]
Yeah, turn the engine over, babe…
Drive it like you still believe in us.

I had Suno (different AI application) gen up a version you can listen to, which wound up a country song and nothing like the Boss, but honestly still pretty awesome. Listen to that here.

The lyrics are eerily appropriate to something the Boss might write. Not mind-blowing, I agree. But it definitely reads like him. Certainly better than anything I could do trying to emulate him.

In my case over lunch, I really felt like reading a King Arthur short story since:

1. I love King Arthur and grail stories, in all their forms
2. I only had a sandwich and didn’t want to deal with anything very long anyway
3. If it sucked, it really didn’t matter. It’s just replacing futile news scrolls and will serve as a place to put my eyeballs and attention for a little while.

I think very highly of Professor Tolkien’s writing style and lament that he didn’t generate a bigger bibliography of fully formed fiction in his unmatchable voice and sense of scale, his ability to summon majestic backdrops and twinkling cities in the distance. So I added to the prompt to make the story roughly 2,000 words and in the style of Tolkien.

What I got was – honestly, not bad at all. First try. Shorter than I had asked, but still interesting. I gave it a couple of ideas to squeeze in to some new attempts, specifically about the Green Knight, and then asked for a cover image. I wanted to test if I could generate an entire pdf ebook (really a packaged short story) without needing Photoshop or other desktop tools.

Just my phone, waiting on a plane.

The cover kind of gave me fits and needed a lot of coaxing, though I didn’t use Photoshop at all for this. I mean, it also named the story for me, generated variations of fonts and layouts, and created the entire front cover just based on prompts (the one in the header, I did in Photoshop, so that’s cheating):

Here’s the back cover it generated for me, based on text it wrote and some prompts to stick to the theme of the story and the front cover:

And finally, having no idea if it was possible, I asked it to include all of this generated content into a pdf. And here that is.

Please keep in mind – I didn’t sit down with Indesign or Photoshop or Word. I didn’t write any of it. I didn’t paint anything. This is me waiting on a plane and punching things into my iPhone to entertain myself.

Crazy world we live in, isn’t it? I think we need to be careful with all this, for sure. Training databases should be combinations of properly licensed images and works or things in public domain. Original creators need to be paid for their work. People using AI ought to say so and be clear how.

Still, crazy world. And a wonderful way to pass some time if you’re itching for a new Tolkien story.

We’re including this post in a new ongoing series where AI is resurrecting interesting people for us to chat with, or dropping them into alternate realities to entertain us (for free). It’s called:

Till next time,