Andy Stanton’s Benny the Blue Whale–equal parts experiment, story, writing manual, and exploration of language–is a hilarious, irreverent, and whip-smart book that both peels back the curtain on authorial process and asks questions about the essence of story and reality.
The book began as an idle experiment with the just-released ChatGPT technology. Stanton asks the AI to “tell me a story about a blue whale with a tiny penis,” drawing on his expertise as a children’s author with the whimsical animal character and throwing in a hefty dose of adult content via the tiny penis. While navigating ChatGPT’s frequent warnings about its inability to generate inappropriate content, Stanton (the Mr Gum series) co-writes a story about Benny the Blue Whale (named by ChatGPT) that gets more and more complex with each question or prompt Stanton provides. Stanton, who nearly lost his grip on reality during his wild experiment, annotates his ChatGPT conversations with an analysis of his own thought processes, assumptions about why ChatGPT made certain choices, ruminations on fiction and reality, and references to literary texts.
With humor, delight, and a good deal of near-insanity, Stanton guides readers moment by moment through the journey he experienced. This is not a book of genitalia jokes (though there are lots of those). Despite its playful appearance, it could be read as a complex philosophical tome, perfect for the increased 21st-century existential dread about machines taking over the world. The book doesn’t alleviate that dread, but it does introduce meaning-making methods for a fractured world.
Read the review on Shelf Awareness: https://www.shelf-awareness.com/sar-issue.html?issue=1215#m23170
Dainy Bernstein 