AI has been writing things for a long time now. Whatever that means. For several years, large numbers of online articles have been produced by machines. And dabblings in poetry and fictional prose are hardly unheard of. But this week, OpenAI’s Sam Altman released something written by what he describes as “a new model that is good at creative writing.” He also stated he didn’t yet know how or where the model would be released, but of course, writers have had thoughts and feelings aplenty.
ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
AI and Literary Influence
First, the story. The prompt is short and simple: “Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.”
Altman describes the result as the first written by AI that “really struck” him.
I have to admit, it struck me too. That the protagonist is called Mila felt particularly apt. If I had to assign a human authorship to the story, it would be Milan Kundera. Not a surprise. Kundera is the most beloved metafictional author of the kind of young man that would be taken by the promises of code. And I have to say, I found the story moving. The same way I still find much of Kundera’s work moving (I wonder how deep the ancestry of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting runs).
Writers React to AI’s Latest Work
What have other authors thought? Jeanette Winterson likes it. She finds something exciting in the “alternative” intelligence of AI—possibility for escaping patterns of thought that are plunging humans toward doom. If I can be meta for a moment and step outside my role as news editor and into that of creative thinking coach, I share the sentiment. And also the complexity of her answer, which looks at what this means for human creativity.
Other responses are interesting. There is a great collection in The Guardian. I can’t help thinking that many responses are shaded by their knowledge of authorship (I can see this becoming seminal in classes about “the death of the author”). I think Tracy Chevalier’s response is most insightful. If an MA student handed her the piece, she says, she would feel excited. I wonder if the reason so many are either mocking or terrified is the fact that this is decidedly not an MA student—though, like a precocious student, one imagines it will learn very fast.
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