AI and Writers

Writing Fiction With ChatGPT Turned into a Moral Showdown

on murder, consent, ChatGPT’s copyright confession, and the literary limits of AI

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All this talk of ChatGPT has me worried that I’ll soon be out of a job, so I decided to put it to the test. Could ChatGPT write fiction? Could it write good fiction?

Below you will find my exchange with ChatGPT transcribed verbatim, with my editorial notes in parenthesis. All of the things in parenthesis are things I did not say to my AI friend, because that would just be mean.

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This entire exchange took about fifteen minutes. Because ChatGPT does not roll easily off the tongue, we’ll call the AI Fred. Our conversations are in bold. All else is Fred’s story (sort of).

MICHELLE: Write a 30,000 word novella about a midlist writer who is murdered by her literary agent.

I should mention here that I adore my literary agent. I was just doing what lazy writers everywhere do: writing about a writer. But I took my laziness to new heights by asking ChatGPT to write about a writer for me.