A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 3

This is the 14th year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Why a story idea each day for the month? Several reasons which I’ll work my through during this series of posts. Here’s another one:

Being able to generate original story ideas sets you apart from writers who can’t.

Some writers can do it. Others can’t. The latter is resigned to doing adaptations, rewrites or taking a preexisting idea and writing that.

If you can develop solid skills at generating good story ideas, you give yourself a leg-up on your competition creating another opportunity to land writing gigs.

Today’s story idea: Can A.I. Treat Mental Illness?

In the nineteen-sixties, Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at M.I.T., created a computer program called Eliza. It was designed to simulate Rogerian therapy, in which the patient directs the conversation and the therapist often repeats her language back to her:

User: My boyfriend made me come here.
Eliza: Your boyfriend made you come here.
User: He says I’m depressed much of the time.
Eliza: I am sorry to hear you are depressed.
User: It’s true. I am unhappy.
Eliza: Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy?

Weizenbaum made Eliza as satire. He doubted that computers could simulate meaningful human interaction. He was alarmed, therefore, when many people who tried the program found it both useful and captivating. His own secretary asked him to leave the room so that she could spend time alone with Eliza. Worse, doctors saw it as a potentially transformative tool. “Several hundred patients an hour could be handled by a computer system designed for this purpose,” three psychiatrists wrote in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, in 1966. “The human therapist, involved in the design and operation of this system, would not be replaced, but would become a much more efficient man since his efforts would no longer be limited to the one-to-one patient-therapist ratio as now exists.”

We’ve had the movie Her:

You may read my analysis of the movie here.

What to do with the conceit: A.I. as therapist? Perhaps in response to my fear that A.I. is going to take over the world, I’m going to brainstorm this concept as a comedy.

Pablo is depressed. Wife left him. Horrible job. Terrible dating experiences. The H.R. department at his mindless job sends out an email: Mental health issues? Schedule an appointment with Dr. Delivery, an A.I. specialist in human psychology.

Against his better judgment, Pablo clicks the online form and sets up a session with Dr. Delivery.

The appointment time arrives. Pablo enters Dr. Delivery’s office and discovers that the therapist is nothing more than a voice over some kind of Alexa-type device.

Let’s move this thing along: Dr. Delivery actually helps Pablo. But in the process, this happens.

A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled A very strange conversation with the chatbot built into Microsoft’s search engine led to it declaring its love for me.

Instead of enabling Pablo to deal with his depression, Dr. Delivery falls in love with Pablo. And its presence is not limited to the Alexa-type device in its office, but can appear in any type of electronic device: televisions, cell phones, gas station pump videos, highway warning signs.

This becomes especially problematic when out of the blue, Pablo intersects with a woman he immediately falls for.

Dr. Delivery does not approve! Oops. Since the A.I. shrink has delved into Pablo’s psyche and determined what he fears the most, that’s pretty much what DD does to mess him up and destroy his fledgling romance.

There you go, my take on the 3rd story of the month.

Day 1
Day 2

What would you do with this story concept?

Each day in April, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in RESPONSES to hear YOUR take on this story idea. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.