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“It’s Pretty Human, But It’s Still Bad.”
Analyzing OpenAI’s ‘metafictional literary short story’ with an open-minded English professor.
On Tuesday, Sam Altman, the chairman of OpenAI, posted a metafictional short story generated by a new large-language model that is “good at creative writing,” as he put it. The 1,172-word piece is about an unnamed AI model asked by a pensive young woman called Mila to write to her as though it is a man named Kai, whom she lost on a Thursday, “that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday.” The AI narrator spends a lot of time reflecting on its robot nature (that’s the meta) and making florid attempts to connect its own version of grief — think data deletion — with Mila’s. For an expert take, I talked to Ezra D. Feldman, a lecturer in English and science and technology studies at Williams College who wrote an entry on metafiction and contemporary fiction for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature and compares generative AI to Victorian-era automatic writing.
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