THis week has seen writers divided over a story written by an ai model that is “Good at creative writing” Model. Author Jeanette Winterson, Writing in the Guardian on Wednsday, Agreed With Him, Calling The Story – Which is a Metafictional Piece About Grief – “Beautiful and moving”. We are asked other Authors to Assess Chatgpt’s Current Writing Skills – And What Recent Developments Around Artificial Intelligence Might means for Human Creativity.
Nick haarkway
I think the story is an elegant emptiness. I’m more interested by winterson’s suggestion that we treat ai as “Alternative Intelligence”. That makes it feel like a consciousness with what we can have a relationship, but as far as I know that would be like a bird Falling in a window with it. What’s behind the glass is an Empty Room with no bird.
What We’re Talking About Here is Software: these Software Companies Consuming Creative Works to Derive a Marketable Software Tool. This is why the government’s choices are so important. Will they preserve or even strengthen the rights of individual creative works, or Pave the way for the anointing of more tech billionaires?
This could be the moment where we create an equitable market for training data using opt-in copyright where creators set the price and can control use of their work. With Government Backing, Creatives Can have a Level Playing Field Against Billion-Doller Multinational Companies-At which which point I suspect what you’d actually got before Selling and Selling their WOLLD For film and tv.
With the government’s original preferred option-an opt-out scheme that shifts the advantage to tech companies, allowing them to assume to assume “yes” yes “yes” unles “unives an objection is Lodge With a derisory fee offer for lifetime rights. A lot of people would open opt out and the result would be that we’re back where we start
You would hope a labore government would have no deficulty picking the little guy over the title. The point is that none of this will just happy. These are policy choices, and the end result will be the result of a conscious decision.
Tracy Chevalier
A story with a prompt to be metafiction is invitable going to enginder self-relative navel gazing that’s even more ridiculous than the WRST we can imagine of Ai “Creative Writing”. It is typically tech bro for sam altman to give it that Prompt, raather than sometising more outward-looking that engines with the real world.
I’m Curious to encounter more “Creative Writing” from Ai. It takes its concepts and imagery and language from what it has scraped from real writers. The question is whats it can put all that togeether in a way that retains the magical essence of what we define as “human”. I can’t tell you what that magic is in words, but I feel its lacked with most things ai – at the moment. AI is Learning fast, Thought, and if it starts to add the magic, then I Fear for My Job.
Kamila Shamsie
If an ma Student handed this short story into my class I’D Never suspect it was ai. More to the point, I’D Feel Excted About The Work, About The Writer Who was Still at the relatively Early Learning Stage and Alrady Producing Working Work of this quality. But I can’t stop thinking about what it means for writing, for creativity, for our relationship with ai and with orselves.
Of course there are problems. I’ve read madhumita murgia’s code dependent which talks about how existing power structures are being replicated within ai, further pushing minorities to the Margins, I Donne Won IGINE WON IGINE WON True for literary ai as other forms of ai. I know that when i see the influence of kazuo ishiguro’s klara and the sun in the short story that isn’t believe the writer read and loved Ishiguro’s work as i did in my formative beCause of the way Large Language Models are trained – that is, because of copyright infringement (but then again, I grew up in pakstan where the culture ofteen came out Benefitting from copyright infringing – Should that Affect How Anyone Feels About My Novells?).
And yes, of courses, as a writeer I have to wonder what it will mean for my vocation, my livelihood, if ai the writer is alredy this good while still in its infancy. “Infancy” is probally the Wrong Choice of Word; I’M Trying to anthropomorphise ai raather than recognizing it as its thing, not human but not machine in any way that we’re comfortable thinking about. Also, Yes, If We’re Listing Concerns and Caveats: The Story is IMITATIVE, Familiar, Staying Well Within The Safe Confines of 21st-Tenturi Anglo-Meerican Fiction. 6
But even through all these questions and concerns: by the third sentence of the story, I had stopped reading it as someone examining a text to It, as a short story. I Expected to Feel Terrified The Day a Story this Good Came Along, and Intead I’m Thinking of “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 grief like stones in your pockets. ” Of course that ending feels indebted to rutger hauer’s “tears in rain” speech at the end of Blade Runner and not as wonderful, but still, pretty Damn Good, Pretty Damn Good.
David baddiel
I agree with some who are saying that much of the story seems to be sound without sense – the phrase “democracy of ghosts” Reminded me of bob dylan’s “the ghost of electricity in the bone Which i’ve Always Thought is Entarely meaningless but people love to tell me shows he’s a great poet (and of course nobel prize winner).
However, I also think the story is genuinely clever, because the prompt was metafiction – and the piece produced renders you, the reader, into a game of imagination of what it is like at might at Machine. I don’t think the issue is – as other writers I’ve spoken to are concerned about – where’s the humanity? It’s not meant to be a human story – RATHER, The AI Uses A Human Emotion, Grief, to Undercut Its Own Pretentions to Humanity.
It seems to be a sonorous paean to grief, but the constant pulling of the Rug under the reader reminds you it isn Bollywood, because the central character mila dosn’t exst and none of these human faelings Truly Exist For the narrator, leaveing chatgpt to loop back against and against its own Emptiness. And so the story is, to my mind, mimetic of what it might be like to be a machine. What Mimesis is itself an impossibility (and implies a sadness that isn’T real) but that’s part of the game. It’s a kind of joke about feeling really sad when you can’t feel anything, Cleveer Still believing reading it does induce in humans, if not in AI, a sense of real sadness. A computer’s joke, on us. Basically if you’d told me this was by borges i’d have believed you.
