Should AI Write Fiction? OpenAI Did – Famous Author Called it ‘Pastiche Garbage’

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on March 11 shared on X (formerly Twitter) that the company had developed a generative AI model capable of being “good at creative writing.” Altman then shared a short story that was allegedly created by this AI model, saying he was “really struck” by the text.

After Altman posted the story, famous authors have expressed vastly different opinions about the content’s quality. For instance, Jeanette Winterson praised the AI story, while Dave Eggers harshly criticized it.

OpenAI models generates short story

Altman’s prompt for the AI was “Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.” In response, the creative writing AI model generated a narrative of approximately 1,200 words. It tells a fictional story of a person named Mila who turns to AI as a source of comfort after losing a loved one. Through the fictional tale, the AI narrator reflects on its own limitations in understanding human emotions and memory.

The resulting story uses highly descriptive language, suggesting the generative AI model may have drawn from the works used in its training data. For instance, the story includes the evocative phrase “a democracy of ghosts,” which was used by Russian American author Vladimir Nabokov in his 1957 novel Pnin.

Authors react to Atman’s short story

Authors’ opinions on the OpenAI short story have run the gamut from praise to criticism. Award-winning British author Jeanette Winterson published an op-ed in The Guardian titled “OpenAI’s metafictional short story about grief is beautiful and moving.” In the article, she wrote “We need to understand this as more than tech. AI is trained on our data. Humans are trained on data too – your family, friends, education, environment, what you read, or watch. It’s all data. AI reads us. Now it’s time for us to read AI.”

However, other writers have sharply criticized Altman’s use of an AI model for creative writing. In an email, Pulitzer Prize nominated 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.”

“There is no such thing as AI creative writing. What AI does is mimic syntax. It’s a cheap party trick,” he wrote. “Art comes from the human soul and all we’ve seen and lived, all the pain we’ve known, all the beauty we’ve witnessed, all the lessons we’ve learned.”

Altman has not disclosed further details about when OpenAI’s creative writing AI model will be publicly released.

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