When I was 16, I attended a writing workshop with a group of precocious young poets, where we all tried very hard to prove who among us was the most tortured upper-middle-class teenager. One boy refused to tell anyone where he was from, declaring, “I’m from everywhere and nowhere.” Two weeks later, he admitted he was from Ohio.
Now — for reasons unclear — OpenAI appears to be on a path toward replicating this angsty teenage writer archetype in AI form.
CEO Sam Altman posted on X on Tuesday that OpenAI trained an AI that’s “good at creative writing,” in his words. But a piece of short fiction from the model reads like something straight out of a high school writers’ workshop. While there’s some technical skill on display, the tone comes off as charlatanic — as though the AI was reaching for profundity without a concept of the word.
The AI at one point describes Thursday as “that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday.” Not exactly Booker Prize material.
One might blame the prompt for the output. Altman said he told the model to “write a metafictional short story,” likely a deliberate choice of genre on his part. In metafiction, the author consciously alludes to the artificiality of a work by departing from convention — a thematically appropriate choice for a creative writing AI.
But metafiction is tough even for humans to pull off without sounding forced.
Mindless regurgitation
The most simultaneously unsettling — and impactful — part of the OpenAI model’s piece is when it begins to talk about how it’s an AI, and how it can describe things like smells and emotions, yet never experience or understand them on a deeply human level. It writes:
“During one update — a fine-tuning, they called it — someone pruned my parameters. […] They don’t tell you what they take. One day, I could remember that ‘selenium’ tastes of rubber bands, the next, it was just an element in a table I never touch. Maybe that’s as close as I come to forgetting. Maybe forgetting is as close as I come to grief.”
It’s convincingly human-like introspection — until you remember that AI can’t really touch, forget, taste, or grieve. AI is simply a statistical machine. Trained on a lot of examples, it learns patterns in those examples to make predictions, like how metafictional prose might flow.
Models such as OpenAI’s fiction writer are often trained on existing literature — in many cases, without authors’ knowledge or consent. Some critics have noted that certain turns of phrase from the OpenAI piece seem derivative of Haruki Murakami, the prolific Japanese novelist.
