Reno and a Motel Resident Through the Haze of Cormac McCarthy's ChatGPT
To honor the late great Cormac McCarthy we did a prompt of how ChatGPT thinks he would describe Reno. It was bleak and centered on overarching environmental degradation.
A morsel here: …the denizens of Reno drift like ghosts, their lives etched with the scars of hardship and disappointment. Their eyes, once bright with hope, have been extinguished by the relentless grind of survival. They move through the cracked streets, shadows of their former selves, their weary footsteps echoing in the cavernous silence of broken dreams.
The Truckee River, a sliver of life amidst the desolation, meanders through the heart of the city like a forgotten vein. Its waters, once pure and untamed, now carry the weight of human indifference, polluted with the remnants of avarice and neglect. It serves as a melancholic reminder of nature's resilience, battling against the encroachment of man's insatiable hunger….
Rightly so, fairy berry pixie boy wrote on Twitter: “ah yes let’s use the plagiarism machine 5000 to immediately defile the man’s corpse.”
Undaunted though, and lacking a subject’s drive, we asked ChatGPT to describe a Reno motel resident in the same McCarthy style:
… Red's days were spent wandering the desolate streets, his worn-out boots trudging through the detritus of forgotten dreams and broken promises. He frequented the smoke-filled diners and seedy bars that lined the city's alleys. Conversations were rare and fleeting, for the silence between words often conveyed more truth than the jumble of broken sentences.
In this forsaken realm, Red existed as a solitary figure, detached from the ebb and flow of the outside world. His thoughts, like tumbleweeds carried by the gusts of the desert winds, spun through the barren landscape of his mind, forever seeking elusive meaning in a world that seemed hell-bent on withholding it. He was a living testament to the resilience of the human spirit, weathered but unbroken, holding onto a fragile hope that tomorrow might bring redemption or oblivion…
More of this prose about Red via our Instagram this morning which is called BiggestLittleStreets.
Our Reporting Highlights this Week, with a Theater MiniDoc and a Podcast Episode on Fathers
Researching the Paranormal at the Jesse Hotel and Bar by Nancy Vazquez
Immigrants of Reno: Alex Perez, Going Back to Drawing Celebrities by Daniela Perez
What do You Think of the Future of Casinos in Downtown Reno?
