I mean I guess I agree it’s fine. Not for me, but as you state this sort of thing is highly subjective. But a few thoughts about the models’ fiction ability and the value of prompting fiction out of them:
1. All the models seem to have the same voice. I’d love to do a blind test, but I think if I had I would have said the same author who did the OpenAI fiction sample Altman posted on Twitter also did this. Maybe it’s simple: there’s a mode of literary fiction, and they’ve all glommed to it.
2. The type of fiction you’ve prompted for is inherently less ambitious. It reminds me of how AI music generators can do 1930s blues quite well. If a style is loved for its sparseness, minimalism, and specific conventions it’s perhaps not surprising superhuman predictors are going to get close – there are fewer chances for an off/silly/bad artistic choice. (They’re going to nail the style of a short AP news piece and trip up with more complicated journalism.)
3. Despite your prompt, when it makes a choice, it’s a cliché. You said “modern” and it went with upper-middle class people, white collar jobs, jogging, burnout, farmers market.
4. Lots of human writers suffer from reversion to the mode; a compulsion to sound like the “good” fiction they’ve read. The difference between them and this is they also can’t help but inject some of themselves into the story – a weird detail from their own life or a skewed perspective they don’t realise is skewed. For me, those things are often the highlight of humdrum fiction. When AI does it it’s like an alien pretending to feel human. “We all know that thing where you buy redundant vegetables, am I right?”
5. I personally am very interested in great fiction from a machine mind. I would love to read its voice and try and understand its perspective. I am not interested in how well it apes human voices and human perspectives. It will be deeply funny to me if it becomes the world’s greatest fiction writer and is still writing stories about relationships it’s never had.
(If it’s not clear: I’m glad you’re posting these pieces! I do find the topic fascinating)
I mean I guess I agree it’s fine. Not for me, but as you state this sort of thing is highly subjective. But a few thoughts about the models’ fiction ability and the value of prompting fiction out of them:
1. All the models seem to have the same voice. I’d love to do a blind test, but I think if I had I would have said the same author who did the OpenAI fiction sample Altman posted on Twitter also did this. Maybe it’s simple: there’s a mode of literary fiction, and they’ve all glommed to it.
2. The type of fiction you’ve prompted for is inherently less ambitious. It reminds me of how AI music generators can do 1930s blues quite well. If a style is loved for its sparseness, minimalism, and specific conventions it’s perhaps not surprising superhuman predictors are going to get close – there are fewer chances for an off/silly/bad artistic choice. (They’re going to nail the style of a short AP news piece and trip up with more complicated journalism.)
3. Despite your prompt, when it makes a choice, it’s a cliché. You said “modern” and it went with upper-middle class people, white collar jobs, jogging, burnout, farmers market.
4. Lots of human writers suffer from reversion to the mode; a compulsion to sound like the “good” fiction they’ve read. The difference between them and this is they also can’t help but inject some of themselves into the story – a weird detail from their own life or a skewed perspective they don’t realise is skewed. For me, those things are often the highlight of humdrum fiction. When AI does it it’s like an alien pretending to feel human. “We all know that thing where you buy redundant vegetables, am I right?”
5. I personally am very interested in great fiction from a machine mind. I would love to read its voice and try and understand its perspective. I am not interested in how well it apes human voices and human perspectives. It will be deeply funny to me if it becomes the world’s greatest fiction writer and is still writing stories about relationships it’s never had.
(If it’s not clear: I’m glad you’re posting these pieces! I do find the topic fascinating)