When AI Writes Like a Teenager
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.
The Angsty Teenager AI
Now — for reasons unclear — OpenAI appears to be on a path toward replicating this angsty teenage writer archetype in AI form.
Creative Writing AI
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.
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.
Ethical Concerns
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.
The Future of Creative Writing
Tuhin Chakrabarty, an AI researcher and incoming computer science professor at Stony Brook, told TechCrunch that he’s not convinced creative writing AI like OpenAI’s is worth the ethical minefield.
Conclusion
In conclusion, while AI may be able to generate creative writing, it lacks the emotional depth and human experience that makes literature truly great. As AI-written narrative fiction provides no similar dopamine hit, no solace from isolation, it is unlikely to replace the art of human writing.
FAQs
Q: Is AI-written creative writing the future of literature?
A: No, AI lacks the emotional depth and human experience that makes literature truly great.
Q: Can AI replace human writers?
A: No, AI lacks the creativity and originality that comes from human experience and learning.
Q: Is AI-written creative writing worth the ethical concerns?
A: No, the use of existing literature without authors’ knowledge or consent raises ethical concerns.
Q: Can AI truly create original writing?
A: No, AI can only generate patterns and combinations of existing works, lacking originality and creativity.
