Eccentric Dictionaries: An Experiment In AI-Enhanced Human Creativity

I’ve always loved what I call eccentric dictionaries. Under that heading I include both standard dictionaries with serious definitions that are salted with a hefty dose of personality, like Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language, and humorous dictionaries with definitions not intended to be taken literally, like Ambrose Bierce’s A Devil’s Dictionary. It’s been a long-standing ambition of mine to write and publish eccentric dictionaries of my own, but there wasn’t an obvious way forward that didn’t involve spending months tediously creating thousands of database entries one at a time- until I got my hands on OpenAI’s GPT-3.