SF writers have thoughts on OpenAI’s new creative writing model

Eggers believes “there are so many good uses for AI,” but creative writing is not one of them. “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.”  

Not everyone was as instantly critical of Altman’s AI story. Fiction writer and University of San Francisco professor Susan Steinberg wondered what she would have thought of the piece if she hadn’t known beforehand that it was produced by AI. “If somebody I knew had written it, I would’ve helped them through it, but there’s a lot I would’ve revised out of it,” she said.

The story’s overabundance of metaphors, to name one literary crutch, felt like a mockery of a certain “writerly style,” Steinberg said. (The Standard asked ChatGPT to count the metaphors in the story; at first, it said 17, then at least 21 and, at most, 38.)

“AI creative writing feels like it’s about a product,” said Steinberg. This misses the point of great writing, which is to produce something beautiful, anguished, and conveyed in a way that feels natural and authentic to its creator. “I don’t want the art I look at to be efficient,” she said. “I want it to be messy and human.”

Jenny Bitner, a novelist and writing teacher at The Writers Grotto, which offers workshops in SoMa, offered a small amount of praise for the AI fiction, describing it as “clever.” However, “there’s a sort of plot problem,” she added. “Toward the end, it’s making a twist, like it was never supposed to tell you that it was an AI creating the story. But it tells us that [in] the very first line.” If she were revising the story, she’d cut the first paragraph.