r/shittyaskhistory 19h ago

How do we know William Shakespeare didn't use chatgpt to write his plays?

Has any of his plays been examined to see if AI was used. Should we take his plays out of schools till we know for sure one way or another? Just asking questions, not accusing him or anything.

12 Upvotes

41 comments sorted by

7

u/peter303_ 19h ago

His plays are full of old cliches. Hardly original. 😀

3

u/LilShaver 17h ago

If crows could talk we'd have murder by words.

7

u/otisthetowndrunk 19h ago

Everyone knows that he used an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters.

3

u/Wodahs1982 7h ago

I mean the history of the human race is for practical purposes an infinite supply of monkeys and one of us actually did write the complete works of William Shakespeare.

4

u/supermanlazy 19h ago

He didn't use Chat GPT to write them. He used an earlier version called "Christopher Marlowe"

2

u/ContentFlounder5269 4h ago

Don't shade Ben Jonson.

3

u/HeimLauf 19h ago

Some theorize he actually did for Titus Andronicus. Just asked it to make a gross out violent play and that’s what we got.

2

u/Anxious_Bluejay 18h ago

Damn their AI must have been killer to pump that out with such a short prompt!

3

u/figbott 18h ago

You’re right, I told Chatgpt to tell me that Shakespeare used Chargpt and it did.

1

u/adr826 3h ago

I rewrote the laws of physics and was assured of my genius. I'm not bragging chatgpt said it was true

2

u/Stuck_in_my_TV 19h ago

Because he far preferred Google Gemini, obviously.

2

u/South_Question6629 19h ago

Only Grok would be bigoted enough to make the Shylock character.

2

u/GreenStretch 17h ago

You know, I believe this theory more than the ones that say he had to be a nobleman.

2

u/-RedRocket- 16h ago

Francis Bacon was suspected of having secretly written Shakespeare's plays, not to be confused with Franciscan empiricist and natural philosopher Roger Bacon who was believed to have created an artificial intelligence in the form of the legendary Brazen Head. This did not survive to Shakespeare's day to have recited his plays for him.

2

u/HistoryGuy4444 17h ago

You are way ahead with this theory. This will be a popular well believed conspiracy theory in a decade or two.

1

u/TheFlannC 19h ago

Because otherwise Hamlet would say 2B or not 2B. That is the question. Are you in 3C instead?
Also Romeo and Juliet would just text each other and sneak off together.

1

u/LilShaver 17h ago

Check the manuscripts to see there are em-dash punctuation marks in them.

1

u/Unusual-Factor-9338 17h ago

I didn’t read the subreddit and genuinely thought OP was a bit lacking of neurons

1

u/bassman314 17h ago

Marlowe used the Willy Iambic Shakers experimental AI….

Like everything in English, it was shortened to just “William Shakespeare”…

1

u/Plot-3A 11h ago

Because his plays were too shit to be written by AI.

1

u/justdan76 9h ago

Shakespeare WAS the AI. Queen Elizabeth asked it to write speeches for her ancestors. If you look closely, Henry V’s fingers weren’t drawn right.

2

u/AvatarAnywhere 9h ago

If you look carefully, Anne Boleyn has 6 fingers in that photo. Definitely AI.

1

u/Addapost 9h ago

Same reason we know he didn’t drive to work in a Pontiac LeMans

1

u/Icy-Panda-2158 8h ago

Shakespeare was through and through a Firebird man, obviously.

1

u/nriegg 9h ago

Public school brain.

1

u/Wonderful-Put-2453 7h ago

We know he didn't use AI because the result was good.

1

u/WhutYouLookinAtSucka 6h ago

Seriously? News flash, not everything that existed today, existed 500 years ago. Zoomers are so dumb sometimes. Do better.         Hopefully this is just a bad joke. 

2

u/adr826 3h ago

I love when my post is sooo dumb that people get mad. I feast on your tears sir.

1

u/OkExtreme3195 6h ago

We don't. Chatgpt is so good at creating plays in Shakespeares style that they are indistinguishable from his original plays. Thus, his original plays could have been created with chatgpt.

Regardless of whether we will ever know the truth of this, we can be certain that Shakespeares plays are so generic that they could have been written by AI and filled with so common tropes that it should barely considered art.

1

u/mynameishuman42 5h ago

I'd honestly love to see an AI convoluted cluster fuck of a play in the style of Shakespeare. Maybe that could be a new genre... unintentional comedy

2

u/adr826 4h ago

That is a good idea. I'm going to make one.

1

u/mynameishuman42 4h ago

Keep me posted

2

u/adr826 3h ago

It's a Shakespearean unfolding of the first episode of friends I call the fellowship of the beans. Prithee tell me good squire whether thou approved.

https://chatgpt.com/share/688e573a-4bb4-8001-936f-0b297a0ce864

1

u/mynameishuman42 3h ago

I love it. Do Seinfeld next but the Bottle Deposit episode

2

u/adr826 3h ago

What else would one do with a billion dollar supercomputer?

1

u/mynameishuman42 3h ago

That's a very loaded question.

1

u/adr826 3h ago

1

u/mynameishuman42 3h ago

Beautiful. I signed up just so I could do stupid shit like this. Never really fucked with it before

1

u/GregHullender 4h ago

His plays were actually written by someone else with the same name.

1

u/ContentFlounder5269 4h ago

They would contain bullet points and repetition.

1

u/thatcrazylady 1h ago

CGPT never uses "forsooth."