Knitted Pizza — Rewritten by ChatGPT
A series in which I take the premise or plot of my short stories and feed them to #ChatGPT in order to see the different versions of a story one could tell.
Experiment #3 — Knitted Pizza published in The Daily Drunk Mag (May 7th, 2021). I asked ChatGPT to provide the plot of this piece after feeding it the short story, and afterwards write a short story based on that plot.
Please read the ChatGPT generated prompt and piece first, and then go and check out the orignal piece written by me for comparison afterwards.
Prompt: Write a short story based on the plot of Knitted Pizza.
Emma was rummaging through her boyfriend’s bookshelf when she stumbled upon a knitted pizza slice tucked between Hegel’s Hauptwerke. She burst out laughing and waved it in front of his face.
“What is this?” she asked with amusement.
He knew what she had found without even looking at it. He had kept it there, thinking that no one would dare touch his books, but Emma was different. She was always curious, always eager to explore.
He smiled and told her about the nihilistic absurdist cult he had once belonged to, which worshipped the movie Reality Bites. They would wear flannel, dance to ‘My Sharona,’ and film everything they did on a bulky video camera, even though DSL-Rs were already readily available.
They had a standing order with the pizza shop downstairs, and whenever they dangled a knitted slice of pizza in front of the window, the pizzaiolo would have three pies ready for them in 10 minutes. The cult would then go out in groups and decorate the inside of a supermarket or two, have raves on the canals, and mob metro cars.
But after a while, the world returned to the way it had been before, and so did the cult. They moved on to their regular lives, becoming bankers, teachers, executives, mothers, fathers, and mailmen, just regular people going about their day.
Emma held the knitted pizza slice in her hand, circling the edges of the red pepperoni slice with her index finger. She asked him about the cult, “What was it about?”
“I still am not sure,” he answered.
Emma laughed, “Well, it sounds like a wild ride, and you were a part of it.”
He smiled, “Yeah, I was.”
As they sat on the couch, surrounded by books, they talked about their dreams, their hopes, and the things they wanted to do together. Emma leaned her head on his shoulder, and he wrapped his arm around her. They didn’t need a cult to feel alive; they had each other.
