A close-up of a pair of metal, mounted binoculars, which superficially resembles a robot’s face.
Photo by Daniil Perunov on Unsplash (cropped)

#182 — dead or alive | ChatGPT

Machines Write Monsters

Marsha Adams
Dead or Alive
Published in
10 min readSep 12, 2023

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Purpose

I do not delude myself that I am a great writer, but on my most confident days, I believe I’m a good storyteller: I can craft stories which intrigue and engross, which connect with the reader on an emotional level, and which explore the complexity of humanity. Whether I do that well is another question, but I think those are the factors which make stories worth telling. They’re also why AI can’t tell great stories.

Most things I know about writing I learnt from reading, and so I only know them instinctively, not academically. I can’t often explain, for example, why I chose a certain narrative structure, or why it felt better to tell the reader something rather than show it to them, but I do know whether or not the finished story works. In that sense, I’m like an AI, which has read widely but doesn’t understand writing at all, only knowing how to string words together in particular ways to form a coherent whole.

AI has read millions more words than I ever could, but I think I write better stories than AI can, because I’m human. I don’t know what aspect of humanity AI fails to capture or reproduce, but whatever it is, it’s as vital to stories as stories are to humanity.

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Marsha Adams
Dead or Alive

Autistic author. Usually found hiding behind a book.