But is it any good? How authors feel about new artificial 'creative writing'

How authors feel about new artificial 'creative writing'

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This week has seen authors divided over a story by an AI model that is "good at creative writing" - at least according to Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, the ChatGPT company behind the technology. Jeanette Winterson, writing in the Guardian on Wednesday, agreed with him, calling the story - a metafictional piece about grief - "beautiful and moving". We asked other authors to assess ChatGPT's writing skills and examine how developments in artificial intelligence might affect human creativity.

Nick Harkaway

I think the story is an elegant emptiness. I'm more interested in Winterson's suggestion that we treat AI as "alternative intelligence". That makes it feel like a consciousness with which we can have a relationship, but as far as I know that would be like a bird falling in love with its reflection in a window. What's behind the glass is an empty room with no bird.

What we're talking about here is software: these are software companies consuming creative works to derive a marketable software tool. So whether creative workers' livelihoods are threatened is a policy question: will the government stand up for a huge UK industry with global reach, or destroy it at the pleasure of Silicon Valley? Will they preserve or even strengthen the rights of individual creative workers, or pave the way for the anointing of more tech billionaires?

This could be the moment when we create an equitable market for training data using opt-in copyright where creators set the price and can control use of their work. With government backing, creatives can have a level playing field against billion-dollar multinationals.