George R.R. Martin may never finish A Song of Ice and Fire, so a fan used AI to write the last two books for him

In July 2011, weeks after the first season of Game of Thrones finished airing on HBO, George R.R. Martin released A Dance with Dragons – the fifth book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. Twelve years later, we’re still waiting for the sixth book, The Winds of Winter. Martin claims to be “making steady progress” on his book, but while we wait, one fan decided to finish the job for the author by using AI to write the final two books in the series.

On GitHub, Liam Swayne explained the experiment and revealed which tools he used to create AI-generated versions of The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring.

Swayne used ChatGPT to generate and expand the outline as well as write the books. He also used the ChatGPT to Markdown Chrome extension to export his chats and feed them back into ChatGPT, Keyboard Maestro to automate feeding thousands of prompts into ChatGPT, and the Python programming language to split and format strings.

During his experiment, Swayne ran into a few issues and surprises, such as ChatGPT “gradually decreasing the maximum length of chats,” discovering mysterious error messages, and creating chats “so long that they crash ChatGPT when generating a shared link.”

But in the end, Swayne successfully generated two whole novels, which you can read here:

Here’s a snippet from ChatGPT’s take on The Winds of Winter, in case you’re curious:

Daenerys placed her hand on the map, her touch reverent yet resolute. The candles flickered, casting a dancing light upon the intricate lines and markings that represented the Seven Kingdoms. “Tyrion, together we shall chart a course that upholds the values of justice, compassion, and progress. The final acts of my journey begin now, and I am prepared to face whatever lies ahead. The Iron Throne will not be a prize to be coveted, but a means to bring about a realm that thrives in peace and prosperity.”

Swayne does not want to replace George R.R. Martin’s books, nor does he want to promote the idea that AI should replace human writers. Rather, Swayne just wanted to see how far one could push ChatGPT, and the results are admittedly impressive. That said, as Swayne points out, any AI detection tool worth its salt could see that these books were generated by AI.