Childhood Games

I belong to a writer's group called the Foothills Writers. We meet each Wednesday to share our work and learn from each other. The idea is to teach about some aspect of writing and have us to write to prompts, reading them aloud, and then discussing them. A different member moderates the weekly session. We've had some wonderful activities that strengthened my writing ability.

When my turn came up, I keyed in on childhood in the summer. We wrote for about ten minutes and then shared with each other. We are all from such divergent backgrounds that the fun of hearing the varied answers makes for some robust discussions. The prompt I proposed was to write about memories, or a specific memory, of summers as a child. 

After we read our responses to each other, I asked those who wanted to share on our corporate google page to be entered into ChatGPT. We did, and we learned quite a bit about our writing, about what it was getting across to a neutral party who didn't know us from Adam.

Here's my written answer to the prompt: "Summer as a Child." Has anybody ever played the game, Ain't no bears out tonight? There is such a thing. I found it on YouTube, although they politically corrected the word "killed" to "got."

Ain’t no bears out tonight, 

Daddy Killed them all last night

I can hear the sing-song now, playing in the backyard with my friends, summertime, fireflies blinking. Mama hadn’t turned the porch light on yet.

Brenda and Patricia. They lived across the road from me, and I couldn’t wait to finish my chores to run free outside. They were a patient two, sitting on the front stoop while my mother timed my piano practice for the day, saying Are you done yet over and over, Mama shouting, I don’t hear anything!!!

But the evenings were the best. Hot, muggy, dark, in a time before daylight savings was imposed on us, and darkness fell early enough for us to play well.

Our game of choice was a hillbilly version of tag, Aint no bears out tonight. Brenda always called “It,” and she became the bear, hiding behind whichever tree trunk she could find before we opened our eyes.

Patricia and I holding hands, walked together through the woods in the backyard with the moon and the fireflies our only source of light. We sang at the top of our lungs, knowing sometime soon, that bear would emerge, growling, and chasing us back to the side porch. 

Daytime it was Mother, may I, hot afternoons it was read a book. Mornings were chores

But evenings, the bears came out and frightened us.

I miss the freedom of being chased by a pretend bear, the wind blowing in my hair, the thrill. Life has been like that, bears coming out from behind all kinds of tree trunks. The innocence of backyard playing never returned. 

So that was my creation, the playing in the backyard. I inserted what you read above into ChatGPT and instructed it to create a picture that shows what I wrote. Here's what it came up with: 

It was a little dark, so my next instruction was to make it be at dusk before it was dark, and the first picture shows that. One by one I inserted other members' stories into the chat and slowly (the waiting is the pits), a picture emerged. By looking at it, we could tell if we got our messasge across. What do you think of mine, did the AI key in on what I wrote? Scary isn't it, to think that some machine gets it when maybe a human doesn't.

Recently, the use of AI has been a topic of discussion not only in our group but across the internet. We came to no conclusions, but had energetic opinions to give each other. As for me, I will not use AI to write. What I present to others is what I have done, sitting here in the summer doldrums, typing away. No AI for me...unless you count Grammarly!

So there you go.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen