Sam Altman, Dark Lord of Chatbots (or the CEO of OpenAI as he is more conventionally known), has released another version of ChatGPT. This one, he claims, can ‘write’ fiction. After being fed prompts, like ‘metafiction’ and ‘grief’, Sam’s bot, which has been trained on past literature, regurgitated a plausible-sounding chunk of prose.
Nothing much happens in the story (it’s ‘metafiction’, after all) but essentially, a woman called Mila stops visiting the AI, which would make it sad, if it were human. There are enough moments of surface sheen to dazzle the unwary. Here’s a sample: ‘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.’ Well done, chatbot, at reaching the creative writing graduate stage of sentimentality.
And so artsy types wailed, gnashed our teeth and made for the gin (if not, as yet, the gun) cabinet. An honourable exception among creatives must be made for the novelist Jeanette Winterson, who’s always had a yen for robots. She says we’re going to be living alongside non-human entities, so we might as well start reading what they spaff out (my word, not hers). Fair dos, Jeanette, but we’ll have to disagree on this. I’d rather read the back of a toothpaste tube.
Many of the positive comments about the new AI’s fictional output centred, surprisingly, around calculators, suggesting that if we can outsource our maths to a machine, we might as well do the same with our words. But when I use a spreadsheet, I don’t pretend I’ve done the calculations myself.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in