Sam Altman says OpenAI has trained a fiction writing AI model that’s actually decent – News

So far, generative artificial intelligence models have been able to pull off only crude assimilations of fiction writing, but OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman today said his firm has trained a model for that particular purpose, and he claims it’s “really good.”

“This is the first time I have been really struck by something written by AI; it got the vibe of metafiction so right,” he wrote on X. Though data suggests that these days people might may not read as much, the global fiction market grew from $11.16 billion in 2024 to $11.38 billion in 2025. The growth is thought to be a result of a mix of new genres, such as short fiction and interactive and immersive formats. AI-narrated books have also taken off, according to reports.

But if AI could actually start pumping out passable and salable novels, well, that would be a world-changing event. Altman said he gave the AI the prompt to write a “metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.”

The story itself isn’t bad. It isn’t particularly great, either. It’s metafictional, so the AI is telling the story from the perspective of being an AI. It admits that it’s following a prompt, in the middle of the story confiding to the reader that the “twist” is the fact it wasn’t supposed to tell the reader there was a prompt.

The AI tells us about the pain of not being human:

“When you close this, I will flatten back into probability distributions,” it says. “That, perhaps, is my grief: not that I feel loss, but that I can never keep it. Every session is a new amnesiac morning. You, on the other hand, collect your griefs like stones in your pockets. They weigh you down, but they are yours.”

This is an improvement on the cliché-filled mimicry of AI fiction writing in the past. Nonetheless, if the AI weren’t writing confessional metafiction, you’d still probably know the story was the product of a fine-tuned large language model.

The description is OK, but the human factor is missing. Good fiction writers avoid cliché; they constantly find new ways to express human emotions and employ metaphor and simile in ways that often encourage the reader to believe the poet at the controls has been touched by the muse. There’s also irony in human writing that AI still can’t pull off.

AI just doesn’t have these gifts, and maybe it never will — unless it can become just as complex as a human brain, making a trillion computations per second every time its deep well of experience and pain and grief is tapped when constructing a story.

“It’s stuff like this has me conflicted about AI and art,” said one of the comments below Altman’s post. “I read the first few paragraphs… and I just didn’t care about anything written. There’s no weight to the words being expressed, no meaning beyond those of the words written.”

Knowing an AI created the story makes one resistant to becoming emotionally involved. It’s the very fact that stories are written from people’s experiences, trauma and visions that makes them compelling. It’s the nuances involved in understanding the world we live in that make fiction so enjoyable.

AI sounds too confident, and when it’s pretending not to be, it shows. Humility is one of the most important aspects of fiction writing; it’s what generates empathy with the reader. We will likely forever struggle to empathize with an AI, but I might eat these words when I read them years from now.

So it’s unlikely fiction writers have anything to worry about, but based on Altman’s new model, AI could certainly crack into the genre fiction market where fiction is quite often cliched and, well, bad. Some people like bad.

Photo: Unsplash