Perplexity Prompt: Create an outline for a murder mystery in the style of Dorothy Sayers
Perplexity Response:
Setting: The Quaint Village of Little Hampden
- Little Hampden is a picturesque English village known for its tight-knit community, charming cottages, and a central village green where the annual summer fete is held.
- The village is surrounded by dense woods and rolling hills, with a small river running through it.
- The local vicarage, the pub called “The Weeping Willow,” and the village hall are the main social hubs.
Introduction: A Mysterious Death
- During the village fete, a beloved local artist, Jonathan Eastwood, is found dead in his studio, which overlooks the village green.
- The death appears to be a suicide, but certain inconsistencies lead to suspicions of foul play.
- Lord Peter Wimsey, visiting his aunt in Little Hampden, takes an interest in the case.
Key Characters
- Lord Peter Wimsey: The aristocratic amateur detective with a sharp intellect and a passion for justice.
- Mervyn Bunter: Wimsey’s loyal valet and assistant, with a keen eye for detail.
- Reverend Thomas Marple: The well-respected vicar with a love for gardening and a secret past.
- Eleanor Brampton: The victim’s muse and a talented painter, known for her fiery temper and tumultuous relationship with Eastwood.
- Dr. Henry Forbes: The village doctor, whose medical opinion on the death raises more questions than answers.
- Inspector Charles Parker: Wimsey’s friend from Scotland Yard, called in to assist with the investigation.
Red Herrings
- A mysterious figure seen near the artist’s studio on the night of the murder.
- A scandalous love letter found in Eastwood’s desk, hinting at a possible affair.
- A recently altered will that benefits a distant relative.
- A disgruntled former student of Eastwood’s who had a public falling out with him.
Twists and Turns
- Evidence that the suicide note was not written by Eastwood.
- Discovery of a hidden compartment in the studio containing a valuable missing painting.
- An anonymous tip that leads Wimsey to question the alibis of several villagers.
- A break-in at the vicarage that uncovers a stash of blackmail letters.
Character Development
- Wimsey’s empathy and understanding of human nature help him connect with the villagers and gain their trust.
- Bunter’s military background proves crucial in deciphering a code found among Eastwood’s belongings.
- Eleanor Brampton’s initial hostility towards Wimsey softens as she becomes an ally in the investigation.
- Reverend Marple’s struggle with his conscience as secrets from his past come to light.
Clues and Evidence
- A palette knife smeared with paint and blood, found in the nearby woods.
- A torn piece of a jacket caught on a bramble that matches the fabric of a local squire’s missing coat.
- A set of footprints leading away from the studio that suggests the presence of a second person.
- The discovery of a rare poison in the victim’s system, not readily available to the public.
Conclusion: Unveiling the Murderer
- Wimsey gathers all suspects for a dramatic reveal in the village hall.
- He meticulously explains how each piece of evidence fits into the puzzle, exonerating the innocent and cornering the guilty.
- The murderer is revealed to be someone unexpected, with a motive rooted in a long-held grudge and greed.
- Wimsey’s clever deduction and attention to human psychology bring the case to a satisfying close.
Epilogue: Aftermath and Reflection
- The village of Little Hampden returns to its peaceful ways, with the shadow of the murder lifted.
- Wimsey reflects on the nature of crime and justice, and the impact of the case on the community.
- Eleanor Brampton dedicates her next painting to Wimsey, capturing the essence of Little Hampden and its resilience.
- Wimsey and Bunter depart, leaving behind grateful villagers and a sense of order restored.
Based upon his playtime with Perplexity, he thinks the AI might be most useful for this sort of question – an author is stuck for a plot and wants some fresh ideas. PG thinks there might be help for sub-plots, character creation, etc., generated with similar more-focused prompts.
Keep your hands off Sayers: this is a mishmash of the plots of many of her Lord Peter Wimsey novels, not something new and interesting and worth writing.
There isn’t a scintilla of anything original. People write this kind of pastiche all the time.
Indeed.
Long before LLMs, a similar approach was used in AI programs for composing music. The algorithm was quite simple: take the last N notes, and choose the next note based on the frequency with which that followed those N notes in the training data. The computational horsepower mostly went into processing that training data.
For N=1, you got random, unmusical noodling. For about N=3, you got recognizable music, but not good or interesting music. At about N=4, if you trained the program on the works of a particular composer, you got bland but recognizable pastiches of that composer’s style. And up around N=7, you got obvious plagiarism. It turns out that composers don’t use the same sequence of seven notes very often, and the program can be forced into a single line of responses, exactly reproducing a chunk of the composer’s original work.
Human language is many orders of magnitude more complex than musical notation, but you have the same problem with focusing the training data. If you specifically ask for something in the style of Helen Sweetstory, it doesn’t take long before the program graduates from Sweetstory pastiches to outright theft. The more detailed your input, the more constrained the subset of training data that you deal with and the faster the program turns to plagiarism.
If you train an LLM on Shakespeare, and give it the prompt ‘Now is the winter of our’, it has nowhere intelligible to go but ‘discontent’. That word follows that phrase 100% of the time in the training text.