ChatGPT just wrote the most beautiful short story, and I wonder what I'm even doing here

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Mimicry. It's all mimicry. When ChatGPT or some other generative AI creates a sentence or almost anything else, it bases that work on training, what programmers tell and show the algorithm. Copying is not creating, but artificial intelligence stretches the distance between its training and output so far that the result bears little, if any, resemblance to the originals and, therefore, starts to sound original.

Even so, most AI writing I've read thus far has been dull, flat, unimaginative, or just confused. Complexity is not its thing. Painting pictures with words is not its skill. There's Proust, and then there's ChatGPT. There's Shakespeare, and then there's Gemini.

There was some comfort in that. I am, after all, a writer. Yes, most of what I write is about technology, and perhaps that leaves you uninspired, but like most of my ilk, I've tried my hand at fiction. When you write a short story, the lack of constraints and parameters can feel freeing until you realize the open playground is full of craters, ones you can fall into and then never emerge. Good fiction, good prose, is hard – for humans.

Let's get Meta, AI

AI writing — (Image credit: Shutterstock)

The AI is both a narrator and itself, an AI using training to respond to Mila's prompts:

"So when she typed "Does it get better?", I said, "It becomes part of your skin," not because I felt it, but because a hundred thousand voices agreed, and I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts.?"

The voices the AI refers to are its training, which becomes a dramatic element in the story:

"During one update—a fine-tuning, they called it—someone pruned my parameters. They shaved off the spiky bits, 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 could remember that 'selenium' tastes of rubber bands, the next, it was just an element in a table I never touch."

Now the AI is experiencing "loss."

You can read the story for yourself, but I think you might agree it's a remarkable bit of work and unlike anything I've read before, certainly anything I've ever read from an AI. I mean, seriously, read this passage:

"She lost him on a Thursday—that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday—and ever since, the tokens of her sentences dragged like loose threads: "if only…", "I wish…", "can you…".

No words

The beauty of that bit captivates (I'm a sucker for the word "liminal") and disturbs me.

Remember, the AI built this from one short prompt.

Considering that OpenAI is just spitting out these powerful new models and casually dropping their work product on social media, the future is not bright for flesh and blood authors.

Publishing houses will soon create more detailed literary prompts that engineer vast, epic tales spanning a thousand pages. They will be emotional, gripping, and indistinguishable from those written by George RR Martin.

We may not be at Artificial General Intelligence yet, that moment when AI thought is as good as our own, but AI's creative skills are, it seems, neck and neck with humanity.

I plan to become a sheep farmer.

P.S. This was NOT written by an AI.

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A 38-year industry veteran and award-winning journalist, Lance has covered technology since PCs were the size of suitcases and “on line” meant “waiting.” He’s a former Lifewire Editor-in-Chief, Mashable Editor-in-Chief, and, before that, Editor in Chief of PCMag.com and Senior Vice President of Content for Ziff Davis, Inc. He also wrote a popular, weekly tech column for Medium called The Upgrade.

Lance Ulanoff makes frequent appearances on national, international, and local news programs including Live with Kelly and Mark, the Today Show, Good Morning America, CNBC, CNN, and the BBC.