Since many of my friends have been amusing themselves asking AI to review their stories, I decided to do the same for a couple of my own stories over at Chat.OpenAI, starting with my recent Lightspeed Magazine story “A Man Walks Into a Bar: In Which More Than Four Decades After My Father’s Reluctant Night of Darts on West 54th Street I Finally Understand What Needs to Be Done.”

Here’s what the AI had to say —

Not only is that not really what the story’s about — the write-up didn’t even mention Donald Trump’s role in it! How could an AI miss that?

I also asked it to review my recent Apex Magazine story “Learning to Accept What’s to Come,” and it thought my protagonists were an elderly couple named Nora and Jerry dealing with their morality, rather than two robots named BR@X15 and CR81321M wandering a post-apocalyptic future.

So that one’s completely off base. Very strange.

I guess AI isn’t yet ready for prime time. At least not when it comes to small fish such as me. (And I suppose “not ready for prime time” isn’t an apt metaphor anymore. Does anyone really care about prime time in our time-shifting world?)