[Agraillo]

> I've tried to get ChatGPT to generate original fairy tales and whatever plot prompt I give it, it spits out what is essentially the same dull story every time.

Not a universal solution, but a working method to get at least sometimes interesting results. You should use it as a co-authoring tool by following these hints: treat this as a dialogue ("let’s create interactively, you and me…", "create a first sentence of a fictional story", ...), where you act like a semaphore for the continuation—judging the current output and either correcting it or suggesting the next step (which can be brief and expanded later by the LLM). Finally, try to suggest unexpected constraints. This can be effective because when your constraint contains a set of words rarely seen together in training data, the output becomes somewhat random but still at least partially grounded in reality.

An example from one of my old conversations with Llama 3.1:

> User: Create a sentence from a fictional book containing the words crazy, cowboy, and gadget.

> Llama: In the wild west town of Crazy Horse, a notorious cowboy named Buckshot Bob unveiled his latest gadget — a mechanical horse that could gallop at breakneck speed.