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I was kicking around a story idea for a super hero setting where all powers are based on speedster type powers. I went to ChatGPT to flesh out the idea a little, and get a condensed list of human cell types. I was originally going to have the list of cell types and then work out how the speedster powers applied to those cell types, but then I just went one prompt further and had ChatGPT do it for me. And I maybe accidentally ruined the whole exercise for myself. I realized I was basically outsourcing the fun part of creative writing and world-building. ChatGPT also did a good job at what I asked it to do, that its hard not to use it.
I also have an old story I wrote and never finished. I've been thinking about feeding the story into ChatGPT and seeing if it can drastically clean it up and then finish the story.
Are you going at this from a soft sci-fi angle or hard? I struggle to think how speeding up any cell types locally results in anything but disease states. Any rapidly dividing cell: tumors, CNS neurons: seizures, cardiac myocytes: arrhythmias, any endocrine cell: hormone imbalance. Not to mention, the increase in metabolic rate means your characters would need to be eating non-stop to keep up with energy demands. I could maybe see an argument for having all cell types uniformly and globally sped up might work (if you also locally distort time so things like diffusion rates for gas exchange in the lungs also increase), but going into specific cell types seems like a hard sci-fi coating on a concept that fundamentally only works as soft sci-fi.
More of a fantasy angle. But I like rules and limitations to power systems. Not sure if that counts as soft sci-fi.
There is bleed over for the "speed power". Its more that a specific cell type is regulating the use of the speed power, rather than the only thing being effected by it. Skin is one of the easier examples I'd thought of. Skin gets hit by something, the skin in that area can call on the speed power and be locally sped up so that the force of the impact is dissipated over a longer time period. So a bullet traveling 2,500mph with a time differential of 100x would hit the skin like a bullet traveling at 25mph. If it was literally just the skin cells it wouldn't really save anyone, it would just preserve a patch of skin on the surface while the force of the bullet travels through to the underlying flesh and does a bunch of damage anyways. So there is bleed over in the speed power. Anything that needs to get sped up by the skin can get sped up. There was also going to be some mechanism that intelligently applies the power without input from humans.
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What on earth did it come up with? Natural Killer cells going out to fight crime? RBCs causing another mass extinction by sucking all the oxygen out of the air? Computers and LLMs replaced with cultured neuronal tissue conducting at 25,000 m/s?
Honestly I find GPT-4 quite handy for worldbuilding, though I find it terrible for making new and interesting superpowers. I usually use it to flesh out my hypothetical musings, translate to different languages, give me cultural context etc.
For example, I was too lazy to learn Jamaican slang, and had it translate something I wrote in plain English, and about 6 months later, I had a Jamaican reader express their surprise at how realistic/authentic it was. Or maybe I want a culturally appropriate name for an interstellar Chinese warship, or an appropriate pet name for a little Chinese girl, I find it enormously useful, even if only directed to flesh out what I came up with.
Some of their ideas were similar to mine. I'd also thought of similar things for "Epidermal Shields", "Neural Navigators", "Myocyte Velocity", and "Leukocyte Guardians". I had slightly different ideas in mind for red blood cells, and had an idea of bone marrow as regenerative types.
I also didn't fully explain to the AI how I imagined the superpowers working.
That is useful to know where the AI helps and where it doesn't. I forget, do you tag your story as AI assisted on royal road?
Nope, since I only use it for idea generation/translation, and I don't think something along the lines of Google translate would cause a need for a declaration either.
There are AI generated images, but those are so obvious I doubt they need declaration, and I don't recall seeing any need for that.
I wouldn't let ChatGPT suggesting similar ideas to what you would have come up with put you off, it seems clear to me that if someone was to be prompted with superhero powers inspired by cells, they'd suggest taking the usual function of a cell, and ramping it up or making it macroscopic.
I think most of the fun comes from second order generation, including some aspects that might not be obvious. Think Acid Man, who spits gastric juices with a pH of 0.1 and melts your face off, Nephron Man who is immune to toxin and pisses high velocity jets of concentrated waste, Melanocyte Man who is uh, really black (and immune to radiation), Memory Cell dude who can identify any disease from a block away, Islet Cell Man who gives his enemies diabetes. The options at endless, even if some of them are obvious/convergent.
(I do think giving Adipocyte Accelerators super speed is a bit funny lol)
Then you could get even wilder, mitochondria man, ribosome dude, integrated transposon and ancient retrovirus lady, The Endogenous Opioid Antagonist as villains of the week. Don't let no chatbot put you off, originality, while desirable, doesn't matter nearly as much as execution.
Those are some fun ones. The mitochondria users I had in mind as the very top of the speedster hierarchy, since they basically have all of the other powers.
There was also some thought that there could be multiple cell types calling upon the speedster powers. A muscle and nerve user would look pretty similar to a traditional speedster.
It also did a thing where it tried to level out all the various cell types and powers, I wasn't planning on doing that. I was thinking there are very clear hierarchies of power. With some cell types being entirely useless, or even anti-helpful. Like sperm users that are basically just dangerously successful at reproduction.
That sounds good to me, I'm all for a hierarchy of powers, especially if you find inventive ways for the seemingly shitty ones to punch above their weight-class.
Maybe consider a God-like Ur-Superhero in the form of Totipotent Stem Cell Man, his sidekick Pluripotent Boy, you know, just because it would be funny.
You could look up a wiki article on all known cell lines and find something obscure, if you want to go beyond the obvious. Cells can and do overlap in functionality, if you want generic superheroes, or weird shit like Neutrophil Dude who swallows his enemies whole and digests them.
Teamwork is the main way they'll punch above their weight class.
I was also not gonna have the traditional hero / villain split that most superhero settings go with. More of a city vs city type model. And civilians are the resource they are fighting over. Your local city you protect, and other cities you attack and make life miserable for civilians, or kidnap/steal their stuff in an attempt to bribe them over to your city. Since there are factions the fights are typically dozens of speedsters. The speedster energy is limited on a personal basis and can take days to recharge, so defenders and attackers want to only use just enough speedster energy to accomplish their objectives.
I think nation vs nation makes more sense, but it depends on what your world looks like, the general tech level, whether superpowers just showed up or have been around long enough for things to adjust and so on. In the end, you can make anything work if you put in the effort to help users suspend disbelief (well, there's superpowers involved!)
The idea of balancing speedsters by making them high value, long cooldown assets is very interesting, especially when you consider things like strategic deterrence and first strike capabilities.
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