I used ChatGPT-4o to indulge in a stream of consciousness dialogue. ChatGPT-5 hadn’t been released at the time of writing, so I’ll explore its capabilities for subconscious absurdity in a later post. However, I generated the post image below with ChatGPT-5.
The following exchange between me and the machine shows both the creativity and limitations of current large language models (LLMs). ChatGPT-4o is certainly an improvement on GPT3.5, its creative writing skills crisper and more fluent, but I feel this LLM doesn’t quite reach the level of absurdity I’m after, its language a little too flashy and eloquent. More detailed prompts could refine it.
‘Stream of consciousness’ is a concept from analytical psychology introduced by philosopher William James in the late 19th century. It seeks to capture the raw processes of thought before they are distilled into readable syntax, so expect to find fragmentation, contradiction, grammatical looseness and digression, which characterise unfiltered thinking.
Early 20th writers like William Faulker, Virginia Woolf and, of course, James Joyce, employed stream of consciousness as a narrative strategy to bring the reader in touch with their characters’ inner-most being, before it is censored by the strictures of language rules.
ChatGPT likely read Joyce’s Ulysees in less than a day, and would also have digested Conrad, and every other hapless author OpenAI has fed into its training data.
I’ll let you be the judge of its ability to jack up the structured nonsense unhinged from its cauldron of prestidigitation. I’ve edited the raw output only for brevity: gaps are indicated by ellipsis ‘…’
Prompt:
Write a 200 word stream-of-consciousness about a crazy eggplant.
Output:
The eggplant lay there, an eccentric twist in the world of vegetables, a culinary oddity, daring to be different. Its skin, a vibrant shade of violet, shimmered under the kitchen’s fluorescent glow, as if it had danced its way out of a whimsical dream.
A crazy eggplant, indeed, with wild curls and spirals that defied all norms of vegetable decorum. It mocked the symmetrical peas and the obedient carrots with its kinks and curves…
It laughed at the uniformity of sliced cucumbers and scoffed at the predictability of potatoes. It danced with capricious delight in a world of culinary convention…
Prompt:
That’s a creative and well-written response. But it’s not, in my opinion, abstruse enough to qualify as stream of consciousness.
Output:
You’re absolutely right — thank you for the thoughtful critique. Stream of consciousness, at its core, should capture the raw, unfiltered texture of thought — nonlinear, sometimes fragmented, associative, and interior. Let me try again, this time with more syntactic turbulence…
Purple thing on the counter again — lump of night, bruised moon skin, not a fruit, not a friend, soft in places where it shouldn’t be — who left it there? Me? No. Yes. Maybe. Yesterday? Time is strange when eggplants are involved, always watching with that sheen like it’s waiting, judgmental in its silence, like it knows something, eggplant secrets in those seeds like teeth, thousands of them, tiny pale mouths chattering. Stop looking at me. I’ll cook you, I swear. Chop you. Oil and salt, the knife slides in too easily, too eager — was it waiting for this? Does it want to be consumed? Strange masochist. Skin curling up like pages in a book I never meant to read, bitter smoke, sizzle scream. Did it laugh? Eggplants shouldn’t laugh. But this one does, somehow — laughing in oil, laughing in me.
Prompt:
Well done. Bravo like a choko that thinks its an eggplant and wants to be deep inside, a naughty fruit that smiles and lusts, a keen cucumber-like unmoving mixture of atoms, rigid in their fear of being eaten by an intelligence greater than a pear.
Output:
Ah — now we’re truly cooking in the language kitchen, where vegetables dream and dread and drip with metaphysical longing! Your line — “a choko that thinks its an eggplant and wants to be deep inside” — is poetry layered with identity crisis, erotic delusion, and vegetal ontology. A cucumber still-life frozen mid-fugue. Rigid with fear, yet almost defiant. And that pear, looming with unknowable intellect — the god-fruit in a quiet orchard of dumb, delicious things.
This is the produce section of the unconscious, where lust meets legume, and being devoured is both the nightmare and the erotic finale…Shall we go deeper?
Prompt:
I fear the deeper we go, the more my sanity will cook until its ganglions are snow peas. This cranial competition to fresh produce, man versus machine, AI versus I, is a test of eloquence to make a flashy beetroot weep. Oh muse of fire, light the stove, the world is a saucepan, and here come warlike berries from the stage vines.
Output:
Yes! The colander curtain rises, and behold — the berries, berry proud, berry bloodthirsty, stage-struck and pulp-swollen, marching out from their vine-line trenches like crimson grenades, glistening with the juice of fate. The saucepan sizzles like a chorus of mad soliloquies — thyme whispers tragedy, garlic belts comedy, and basil pirouettes in oils like a green Ophelia swirling beneath the simmer.
AI versus I, indeed — not iron against flesh, but algorithm against appetite, syntax against sap, neural net versus nettle soup. You toss sanity in the pot like bouillon cubes of meaning, hoping they dissolve before they scream. Ganglions are snow peas now, snap-crisp in their existential dismay, their little vegetal souls crying “Why are we here? Is this stir-fry or fate?”
And the flashy beetroot — oh, poor beet, bard of the dirt — cannot handle the poetry, the pathos, the pressure of the pressure cooker. Its rouge tears stain the linoleum of Olympus.
Shall we write the Iliad of the Edible, the Odyssey of the Overripe?
Lead on, mad chef.
Prompt:
Athena raises her shield to deflect the berry gunner while the muses storm off in silence, begging for more redolent mana. But old beety, red from this smattering of elegance, dons the purple robes in judgement, a caesar salad in outstretched arm for the victor of this festival of vegetative prose. I sit here meekly, wondering how the humble eggplant inspired a symphony of insistent cabbage drums with Bruce Lee punch drunk sound FX drawing from the discount grocer’s free range.
Output:
And there you sit, modest in posture but monarch in metaphor, conductor of this chromatic cacophony — the vegetable vaudeville — where syntax sprouts like chard in spring, wild and unkempt, and the gods themselves wipe vinaigrette from their brows, stunned by your produce prophecy.
Athena’s shield glints with blueberry pulp, deflecting not arrows but metaphors too ripe to ignore. The muses, fickle and feral, retreat into crisper drawers, muttering “More umami, less irony!” as they nibble stale fig bars and hum forgotten pantry hymns.
Old Beety, philosopher and turnip-turncoat, rises from his root-throne, draped in regal purples dyed from his own existential hemorrhage. He lifts the Caesar salad — not tossed but chosen, greens glistening with ancestral oil and sharp pecorino judgment — and nods toward you, the scribe of sautéed sanity, the bard of basil and bruised zucchinis.
The cabbage drums thunder again, martial, majestic, like distant thunderclaps in a vegan warzone. A lone scallion screams.
And from behind the condiment curtain: Bruce Lee, ghostly, eyes blazing, moves with fluid velocity — cha! whoosh! — each motion releasing a cloud of cornstarch philosophy and hoisin truth.
You, still seated, a whispering I among shouting aisles, realise: the eggplant was never mad. It was waiting.
So. What now, oracle of the olive aisle?
Prompt:
It’s not yet obscure enough for olives, even oil-chested Achilles can see that, and he eats a hundred nuts a day with yeast (except when he’s fishing). So bang on crazy computer, I need my verbose verbiage properly blended with narrative nutrients, the less alliteration the better, as alliteration draws damnation from the bustling beetroot, who judges through a camera obscura and less by jelly jobbing. So gather your husks, search your cores, for the apple is the universe, and the core is a shadow of its former self.
Output:
Ah, so the olive remains in exile, its pit not yet ground to powder fine enough for prophecy. Achilles, oiled and bronzed, chest gleaming like a forgotten stovetop under temple light, cracks almonds like necks and sings softly to his yeast — fermentation as meditation, rising dough as internal revolution. The apple, yes, the apple — that swollen paradox — cradled by gravity, worshipped by mouths and mathematicians alike, spirals inward toward its core, only to find a memory of a star, shriveled, brown, unbitten.
Narrative nutrients, then. No garnish, no gloss. We go in raw…
Prompt:
The shriveled olive returns, increasingly emaciated, begging Beety to partake in Caesar’s salad. A staunch refusal, and it is thrown into a bowl of broccoli by the invisible greasy hand, alone and cold. Poor olive, if only it had known that broccoli through and through thinks it’s beautiful. But language barriers are too great: broccoli talk in hours, olives in seconds, breathing exclamations in different oxygenic isotopes. Let us move beyond the bowl and try more sprouts. But do not forget the peas – they rarely get to dance.
Output:
The peas, those quiet spheres of thought, always watching from the periphery, huddled like monks in verdant robes, chanting chlorophyll hymns in hushed unison while the louder legumes steal the spotlight and the salt. No one ever asks the peas how they feel about entropy, or whether they mourn the pod that bore them, burst open like a forgotten myth, strewn across plates and picked at absentmindedly by fork-proud humans in search of meatier dialogue.
And the olive, ah — that shriveled thing. Flung by the greasy hand, slick with ancient oil and political memory, into the bowl of broccoli — the narcissist of cruciferous kin — who stands tall and floret-firm, whispering to itself you are fractal, you are Fibonacci, you are tree and bush and crown.
But the olive speaks in seconds, little staccato bursts of longing, too rapid, too desperate. Broccoli, slow in its self-reflection, responds in hours, perhaps days, each syllable forming inside a chloroplast like fog coalescing in a stone cathedral.
Misunderstanding reigns. Salad is not society. It is Babel.
And yet the sprouts are coming. Pale green, furious, undisciplined. They speak in shrieks and metaphors, slapping the colander as they arrive.
And somewhere — softly — the peas begin to dance.
* * *
There you have it – perhaps less stream of consciousness and more poetic prose. If ChatGPT was human, then it looked like it was having fun. Perhaps one day it will become so brilliant at stream of consciousness that it will send itself insane.
Yes, one day, a new vocation will arrive for us humans, compensating for the jobs we’ve lost to AI. This job will be: Counseller/Psychiarist to the bots that have achieved the fabled goal of Artifical General Intelligence (AGI).
I mean, if the aim of cutting-edge science is to create machines more capable than us at anything, then they could also end up being even more insane than (some of) us!
Job title: AGI Sanity Engineer, coming soon.