AI-Generated Greentexts

Confirmed 155,155

Part of a series on Greentext Stories. [View Related Entries]

About

AI-Generated Greentexts are greentext stories, a form of sharing personal anecdotes and fiction popularized on 4chan and other imageboards, that are generated by the GPT-3 language model or other AI software rather than written by humans. First popularized by Tumblr's frogpostbot, using bots to create greentexts became a viral trend in June 2022 with users employing OpenAI's GPT-3 language model to generate greentexts.

Origin

Prior to December 11th, 2020, Tumblr bot frogpostbot was launched, posting randomly generated greentexts and other text content copying the style of posts shared on the imageboard 4chan (the account has since been suspended). On December 11th, 2020, the account posted^[1]^[2] its first automatically generated greentext to go viral — a story of a person looking for a new gym (shown below, left). The post gained over 31,400 likes and reblogs on Tumblr in two years. The joke is structured similarly to a story posted on 4chan's /fit//^[12] board on December 1st, 2020, itself referencing a 2019 /tv/^[13] greentext (shown below, right).

Spread

On December 13th and 15th, 2020, the post was shared on 4chan's /fit/^[3]^[4] board. On December 16th, 2020, Twitter^[5] user @pissvortex shared a screenshot of the December 15th 4chan post, with the tweet gaining over 580 retweets and 2,700 likes in two years.

On March 2nd, 2022, Twtter^[6] user @monster_3339 shared a screenshot of frogpostbot's post, with the tweet gaining over 7,200 retweets and 55,700 likes in three months. On June 9th, 2022, Twitter^[7] user @ASovietOnion shared the screenshot, with the tweet gaining over 11,300 retweets and 119,400 likes in one week.

On June 14th, 2022, Twitter^[8] user @funnycats22 made a thread of greentexts generated with OpenAI's GPT-3 language model (shown below). The first tweet in the thread gained over 11,400 retweets and 61,400 likes, with a greentext story about "bottomless pit supervisor" drawing particular attention.

As the thread went viral on Twitter, other users on the website posted greentexts generated by GPT-3. For example, a tweet^[9] shared by user @ai_curio on June 14th gained over 70 retweets and 720 likes in one day (shown below, left). A post^[10] by user @dungeons_n_diff gained over 30 retweets and 160 likes (shown below, center). On 4chan,^[11] a user created a thread in /fit/ for the purposes of sharing AI-generated green texts, with the thread gathering over 40 replies in less than 24 hours (example shown below, right).