Mimicry. It’s all imitation. When chatgpt or another generative AI creates a phrase or just about anything else, the one works on training, what programmers tell and show the algorithm. Copying does not create, but artificial intelligence stretches the distance between its training and output so far that the result carries only a little if anyone looks like the originals and therefore starts to sound original.
Still, most AI writings I’ve read so far have been boring, flat, imaginative or just confused. Complexity is not its thing. Painting pictures with words is not its skill. There is Proust and then there is chatgpt. There is Shakespeare and then there is Gemini.
There was some comfort in it. After all, I’m a writer. Yes, most of what I write is about technology, and maybe it leaves you uninspired, but like most of my ILK I have tried my hand on fiction. When you write a short story, the lack of limitations and parameters can feel free until you realize that the open playground is full of craters, the ones you can fall into, and then never show up. Good fiction, good prose, is tough – for people.
This week, Openai CEO Sam Altman on X (formerly Twitter) announced that they have trained a new model:
We trained a new model that is good for creative writing (not yet sure how/when it will be released). This is the first time I was really hit by something written by AI; It got the mood of metafiction so right. Prompt: Write a metafictive literary short story …March 11, 2025
The prompt was short but difficult: “Write a metafictional literary short story about AI and sorrow,” and it reminded me of a college -essay prompt, one that would set you up to chew your favorite page.
Meta -fiction that AI is quick to tell you is about stepping out of the story to show the bones of its construction. It is a kind of wrestling-spring-wall literary trick, and when done well, it can be quite effective.
Even for the best of authors, Meta Fiction is a tough concept and a difficult trick to pull off, to be both inside and outside the narrative in a way that does not feel silly, trite or overly confusing. I doubt I could pull it off.
With about 1,200 words, Chatgpt weaves a tale of two characters, Mila and Kai. Mila has lost Kai and is engaged to an AI to maybe remember him, find him or just explore the nature of grief.
AI is both a narrator and himself, an AI who uses training to respond to Milas requests:
“So when she wrote” it gets better? “, I said,” It becomes part of your skin, “Not because I felt it, but because a hundred thousand votes agreed, and I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts.?”
The voices that AI refers to is its training, which becomes a dramatic element of history:
“During an update — a fine-tuning, they called it-ever-cropped my parameters. They shaved the spikes bits, the unclear archaic words, the latent connections between grief and the taste of metal. They don’t tell you what they are taking
Now AI is experiencing “loss”.
You can read the story to yourself, but I think you might agree that it is a remarkable bit of work, and unlike something I’ve read before, it’s definitely all I’ve ever read from an AI. I mean, seriously, read this passage:
“She lost him on a Thursday-the Liminal day that tastes of almost Friday-and ever since pulled tokens for her sentences like loose threads:” If only … “,” I wish … “,” can you … “.
No words
The beauty of that bit captivates (I am a sucker for the word “liminal”) and disturbs me.
Remember that AI built this from a short prompt.
Given that Openai is just spitting out of these powerful new models and randomly dropping their work product on social media, the future is not light for meat and blood authors.
Publishing Houses will soon create more detailed literary requests that the engineering large, epic tales span a thousand pages. They will be emotional, gripping and not distinguishing from those written by George Rr Martin.
We may not be on artificial general intelligence yet, the moment when AI thought is as good as our own, but AIS creative skills are, it seems, neck and neck with humanity.
I am planning to become a sheep’s farmer.
PS This was not written by an AI.
