The Alien Covenant movie from 2017 teased possibilities of how the story evolves. But now, seven years later, progress has yet to be made. How will David’s biological experiments continue? Will Covenant make it to Origae-6? What exactly happened to Shaw on Paradise? And more importantly, what is behind the Engineers’ race? Does it have to do something with the fossilized Space Jockey in the 1979 Alien movie? What had happened on LV-426 before Dallas’s team landed on this harsh planetoid? Too many questions and no answers.
That provides an exciting opportunity for me to develop the Covenant saga. Two trends have met nicely in this case. The first is Ridley Scott’s unwillingness to continue with the story after it received a lukewarm reception in theaters. The second is the emergence of generative AI.
Therefore, I will write a novel connecting the Alien: Covenant movie (which occurs in 2104) and the Alien movie (2122). My story will deal with the Covenant’s plot and explain Space Jockeys' origin and their role.
I plan to use generative AI (mostly Jenny, aka ChatGPT, but also Grammarly to polish the text). It will work like this: I write, Jenny provides feedback, and I modify my texts accordingly. There are three reasons why I chose this type of cooperation.
First, it’s an exciting experiment, and I look forward to sharing the knowledge I will gain from this project. I will publish my findings on this blog.
Second, AI models are trained on vast amounts of text, which could cause problems with intellectual property. I don’t want the generative AI to write something that would interfere with some writers’ ownership. For this reason, I will be responsible for the writing. Jenny will just tell me what needs to be improved.
Why? Third, although I read a lot, I have no experience with English-written novels. But I still want to emulate their style, especially the "show, don't tell" principle. Therefore, I have created a custom-made GPT to whip me up to a world-class text. (Or, at least, I hope so.)
I have spent the last months creating the main and secondary plots. Now (=October 2024), I have finished the main one and started consulting it with Jenny. She has usefully highlighted aspects I should heed, like filling holes in the plot and better explaining the characters' motivation.
My imagination has concocted a very dark story I’m eager to share. Let's discover what happened before the face-hugger leaped onto unlucky Kane.
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