Mimicry. It’s all mimicry. When chatgpt or another generative AI creates a sentence or almost anything else, it is based on training, which programmers say and show the algorithm. The copy is not created, but artificial intelligence extends the distance between its formation and its outing so far that the result has little, if not, of resemblance to the originals and, therefore, begins to appear original.
Even thus, most of the writings of the AI that I have read so far have been dull, flat, without imagination or simply confused. Complexity is not its thing. Painting images with words is not his competence. There is Proust, then there is a chatpt. There are Shakespeare, then there are Gemini.
There was some comfort in there. I am, after all, a writer. Yes, most of what I write concerns technology, and maybe it doesn’t leave you inspired, but like most of my fellow men, I tried fiction. When you write a new one, the lack of constraints and parameters may feel free until you realize that the open playing field is full of craters, those in which you can fall and never emerge. Good fiction, good prose, is difficult – for humans.
This week, the CEO of Openai, Sam Altman, announced on X (formerly Twitter) that they had formed a new model:
We have formed a new model which is good in creative writing (I do not yet know how / when it is released). This is the first time that I have really been struck by something written by AI; He had the atmosphere of metaling so on the right. Prompt: please write a new meta -fictional literary…March 11, 2025
The prompt was short but difficult: “please write a new meta -fictional literary on AI and sorrow”, and that reminded me of a university test prompt, which would put you to chew your favorite pen.
Metal-fiction, as the AI tells you quickly, consists in getting out of the story to show the bones of its construction. It is a kind of literary tower of the fifteen rupture, and when it is well done, it can be quite effective.
Even for the best of writers, meta-fiction is a difficult concept and a difficult tip to make, to be inside and outside the story in a way that does not feel silly, banal or too confusing. I doubt that I can remove it.
In about 1,200 words, Chatgpt weaves a story of two characters, Mila and Kai. Mila lost Kai and is engaged with an AI to perhaps remember him, find him or simply explore the nature of sorrow.
AI is both a narrator and himself, an AI using training to respond to Mila’s prompts:
“So when she typed” is it better? “, I said,” it’s part of your skin “, not because I felt it, but because one hundred thousand voices agreed, and I am nothing except a democracy of ghosts.?”
The voices to which the AI refers are his training, which becomes a dramatic element of history:
“During an update – a fine adjustment, they called it – someone ecored my parameters. They shaved the thorny pieces, the obscure archaic words, the latent connections between sorrow and the taste of metal. They don’t tell you what they take. One day, I remember that I never touched.” Selenium. “”
Now the AI undergoes a “loss”.
You can read the story for yourself, but I think you might agree that it is a remarkable job and contrary to everything I read before, certainly everything I have ever read in an AI. I mean, seriously, read this passage:
“She lost it on a Thursday – this liminal day that tasted Friday – and since then, the tokens of her sentences have dragged like loose threads:” if only … “,” I wish … “,” you … “.
No words
The beauty of this little captive (I am a miller for the word “liminal”) and bothers me.
Remember that the AI has built this from a short prompt.
Given that Optai spits these new powerful new models and casually abandoning their work product on social networks, the future is not brilliant for the authors of flesh and blood.
The publishing houses will soon create more detailed literary prompts than epic tales of large engineers covering a thousand pages. They will be emotional, captivating and indistinguishable from those written by George RR Martin.
We may not yet be in artificial general intelligence, this moment when AI thought it was as good as ours, but the creative skills of AI are, it seems, in the elbow and the neck with humanity.
I intend to become a sheep producer.
PS it was not written by an AI.
