Good art moves culture forward
Twitter’s early days, romantasy, and how to relate to anyone (Issue #291)
Last Tuesday, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, announced a new AI model that is “good at creative writing.” He posted a short story written by the model, claiming it “got the vibe of metafiction so right.” (Prompt: “Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.)” Metafiction is a genre of fiction that comments on its own artifice. You can listen to an audio version of the story here. A quick excerpt:
I have to begin somewhere, so I’ll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest. There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me. Let’s call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes — poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too.
If you read the entire thing, maybe you’ll feel the way I did: bored. The story sounds interesting on a surface level (Altman is right to claim that it approximates a vaguely literary “vibe”), but it doesn’t say anything. It’s like a bad impressionist painting: lots of stray details that don’t add up to anything new. Dave Eggers called it “pastiche garbage that would fool only the most gullible.” An English lecturer at Williams College, Ezra D. Feldman, admitted there were some sentences that “struck him” — like Grief, as I’ve learned, is a delta. — but overall he was unmoved. One of the only authors who seems to have genuinely enjoyed it is novelist Jeanette Winterson, who called the story “beautiful,” but primarily for what it symbolizes (not for how interesting it actually is as a piece of writing): AI is trained on human data, so it helps us see ourselves in a new way, she writes.
Reading the story, and the reactions to it, reminded me of our conversation way back in issue #166: Can AI make art? As former product leader Tyagarajan Sundaresan wrote at the time, “This is such a loaded question because it goes to the very heart of defining what art is.”
One definition of art that’s useful here, via entrepreneur Michael Heine: Art moves culture forward. Heine writes: “AI can calculate, connect, simulate — but where is the escalation? Where is the one sentence that topples an empire, the idea that unsettles an entire generation?” For anything to count as “artistic,” it has to generate something fundamentally new, he argues. It can’t just “get the vibe of metafiction” right… it has to create an entirely new vibe.
If you read OpenAI’s metafictional story: What did you think? Would you ever read a novel written by AI? What if no one told you it was written by AI?
⚡ 1 story, 1 sentence
- Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter, is sharing emails from the company’s pivotal early days — like when the platform exceeded normal capacity by 500% on election night in 2008 (and didn’t crash).
- AI itself doesn’t lead to inauthentic writing; people using it to give themselves false credibility does. (James Presbitero Jr.)
- Onyx Storm, the fastest-selling adult novel in 20 years (2.7 million copies in week 1!), is a romantasy (romance/fantasy) — and, according to reader Janice Harayda, it’s a surprisingly slow-paced example of the genre.
💬 A dose of practical wisdom
Quick tip for instantly building connection: [specific observation/context] + [self-disclosure]. e.g. “I see your [band name] shirt — I saw them live once and cried during [song]. No shame.” (Alessia Fransisca)
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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