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OpenAI Model Writes Literary Metafiction on Grief and AI. An Analysis
Sam Altman said he was “really struck” by it. I was more confused than struck, which is why I was driven to unpick it.
I admit I was mesmerized as I started reading “A Machine-Shaped Hand,” because the machine dove in with a powerful voice. And it wasn’t that of a robot either — at least not the way Ishiguro imagined it in Klara and the Sun. No, this was something resembling a human voice, telling me she got instructions to write literary metafiction about AI and grief and that she was a machine serving the need of someone else.
It sounded like she had a story to tell, all while being open about the pretenses and artifice of a narrator, so I read on. And that’s when I ran head-on into a stumbling block, because the machine included in the same sentence the notions of a screen cursor, buffer, and, take this, a pulse evincing both anxiety and a heart free of anxiety, at rest, if we go by the expression “to set one’s heart at rest,” which the machine mixes with that of a resting pulse.
Moving on. The next sentences introduce a made-up protagonist, Mila, along with a batch of associations from whatever texts that mentioned this name and something else in close proximity — things like snow, bread, and…
