So How Did The AI Do?

So last week I had the AI write the essay. It was kind of interesting. I can't say I was super impressed with the results but I wanted to give all of you guys the chance to see what you thought. The question I would ask is if you could tell there was a difference in writing style and all of that? Was it immediately inherent that I didn't write it?

That fun aside, it completely missed the ball on what I was going to talk about last week. Part of that could be that I suck at prompt writing but I don't think that's the case because I've gotten solid results in the past. The direction I would have went with the essay was to focus on 1 King 11:17 specifically.

My thoughts were as follows. Joab struck down all the men in Edom. See 1 King 11:16. He and his men spent six months hunting down and killing all the men of Edom. If that's not the definition of a genocide, I don't really know what is. I suppose maybe they weren't killing women and children. That might make it a bit less evil, but I'm not super convinced. At any rate, the point I was going to focus in on was how despite killing everyone, Joab missed Hadad along with some Edomite officials who fled to Egypt.

This of course set up a revenge arc. As soon as Hadad got news that David and Joab were now dead, he requested permission from the Pharaoh to go back to Israel. Although it's not explicitly clear, it seems like he went on to raise some havoc and generally be a pain in Solomon's butt.

So, where I was going to take the post was to talk about how if you're going to go around massacring whole people groups, you better do a good job of it. Because if you leave any survivors, they'll no doubt be dedicated to revenge. The whole purpose of killing the Edomites was to eliminate a problem for Israel. By leaving some alive, Joab sewed seeds that would grow into a future problem. If you've already resigned yourself to complete and utter moral depravity, you might as well go all the way.

That was the intended target for last week's essay. To flush out how if you're going to be evil, do a good job of it. Instead of targeting that, the AI went a few verses down and covered the story of how Jeroboam rebelled against Solomon. Said story is interesting in and of itself but it certainly wasn't the intended target. It actually has almost a completely different moral in my view.

With Jeroboam, the lesson there is that you can't foil God, even if you're a king. By the point that Jeroboam enters the story, Solomon has already started botching things up. That is to say, he's basically transformed into a hedonistic playboy. I don't know what else to call a king who has seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. Naturally, God wasn't very impressed with this, especially because Solomon's wives turned his heart away from God. So Jeroboam was God's response to this. Because of his behavior, Solomon was going to lose the kingdom. Jeroboam was the one that God decided to give it to.

When Solomon found out, he tried to kill Jeroboam, but that didn't exactly work. Jeroboam fled to Egypt where he remained until Solomon died. Interestingly enough, this whole fleeing to Egypt thing is kind of a reoccurring theme in the Bible. Joseph, Mary and Jesus even spend some time in Egypt. But at any rate, I think that's enough of this for now. The key takeaway is that the AI has a bit to go yet. Looks like I'll still have a job for the time being.