Mimicry. Everything is imitation. When chatgpt or some other generative creates a prayer or almost anything else, it bases that on training, what programmers tell and show the algorithm. The copy is not creating, but artificial intelligence extends the distance between its training and exit so far that the result has little, if there is any, similarity with the originals and, therefore, begins to sound original.
Even so, the majority of the writing of AI that I have read so far has been boring, flat, unique or simply confused. Complexity is not your thing. Painting images with words is not your ability. There is Proust, and then it is chatgpt. Shakespeare is, and then there is Gemini.
There was some comfort in that. I am, after all, a writer. Yes, most of what I write is about technology, and maybe that leaves you without inspiration, but as most of my type, I have tried my hand in fiction. When you write a short story, the lack of limitations and parameters can feel liberating until you realize that the open patio is full of craters, which you can fall and then never arise. Good fiction, good prose, is difficult for humans.
This week, the Operai CEO, Sam Altman, announced on X (previously Twitter) that they have trained a new model:
We train a new model that is good for creative writing (I’m not sure how/when it will be launched). This is the first time that something written by AI really surprises me; He obtained the correct metafiction atmosphere.March 11, 2025
The notice was short but difficult: “Please write a metafictional literary story about AI and pain”, and reminded me of a university essay warning, one that would put it on chewing your favorite pen.
The fiction goal, as the AI is said quickly, is about leaving the narrative to show the bones of its construction. It is a kind of literary trick that breaks the fourth wall, and when it is done well, it can be quite effective.
Even for the best of writers, the goal fiction is a difficult concept and a hard trick to achieve, to be inside and out of the narrative in a way that does not feel silly, thundered or too confusing. I doubt that I can achieve it.
In approximately 1,200 words, Chatgpt woves a story of two characters, Mila and Kai. Mila has lost Kai and is committed to an AI to perhaps remember, find him or simply explore the nature of pain.
The AI is both a narrator and itself, an AI that uses training to respond to Mila’s instructions:
“Then, when he wrote” Does it better improve? “I said:” It becomes part of your skin, “not because I felt it, but because one hundred thousand voices agreed, and I am nothing more than a ghost democracy.”
The voices referred to in AI are their training, which becomes a dramatic element in history:
“During an update, an adjustment, they called it, someone could my parameters. They shaved the pointed pieces, the dark archaic words, the latent connections between the sadness and the taste of the metal. They do not tell you what they take. One day, I could remember that the rubber flavors of the ‘selenium’, the next one, it was only an element at a table, they never give me the touch.”
Now AI is experiencing “loss.”
You can read the story for yourself, but I think I could agree that it is a little notable work and, unlike everything I have read before, certainly anything I have read of an AI. I mean, seriously, read this passage:
“She lost it on Thursday, that liminal day that knows almost Friday, and since then, the chips of her prayers crawl like loose threads:” Yes only … “,” I wish … “,” Can you … “.
Wordless
The beauty of that captive part (I am a fan of the word “liminal”) and disturbs me.
Remember, the AI built this from a brief notice.
Taking into account that Operai is only spitting these new powerful models and casually eliminating their work product on social networks, the future is not brilliant for the authors of meat and blood.
Editorials will soon create more detailed literary indications that engineering vast epic stories that cover a thousand pages. They will be emotional, exciting and indistinguishable from those written by George Rr Martin.
We may not yet be in artificial general intelligence, that moment when AI thought is as good as ours, but the creative skills of AI are, apparently, the neck and neck with humanity.
I plan to become a sheep farmer.
PS: This was not written by an AI.
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