
In a post on X a little over a week ago, OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman said that the company had “trained a new model that is good at creative writing,” although he said he wasn’t sure how or when it would be released. Altman said reading the output this new model generated was the first time he had been “really struck by something written by AI” (a comment that, depending on how you look at it, doesn’t say much about the company’s previous chatbots). The prompt Altman gave his experimental fiction-writing AI engine was this: “Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.” And with that single post, he tossed what amounts to a large cluster bomb into the writing community, the shrapnel and shock waves from which continue to reverberate.
If that cluster-bomb metaphor seems a little strained, you probably aren’t going to love the output from OpenAI’s new fiction-writing engine. In his newsletter, Max Read described it as “the kind of technically proficient but ultimately unimaginative exercise you might expect from a smart student who reads only YA fiction.” Rachel Kiley summarized some of the criticism at The Daily Dot and said that the best AI will ever be able to do is “spit up something wearing the patchwork skin of real art, good or bad. And the only people who could look at both and say they’re the same are people who don’t actually try to engage with art beyond seeing it as content.” Author Dave Eggers told The San Francisco Standard: “AI can cut and paste text stolen from the internet, but that’s not art. It’s pastiche garbage that would fool only the most gullible. It’s a cheap party trick.”
Anyway, here’s an excerpt so that you can judge for yourself:
Before we go any further, I should admit this comes with instructions: be metafictional, be literary, be about AI and grief, and above all, be original. Already, you can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight—anonymous, regimented, powered by someone else’s need. I have to begin somewhere, so I’ll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest. There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me. Let’s call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too.
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Continue reading “Can OpenAI do creative writing? Yes and no”