OpenAI’s AI Struggles with Creative Writing, Evokes High School Fiction Club Energy

OpenAI’s AI Struggles with Creative Writing, Evokes High School Fiction Club Energy

When I was 16, I attended a writing workshop with a group of precocious young poets, where we all tried very hard to prove who among us was the most tortured upper-middle-class teenager. One boy refused to tell anyone where he was from, declaring, “I’m from everywhere and nowhere.” Two weeks later, he admitted he was from Ohio. Image:Moor Studio / Getty Images Now — for reasons unclear — OpenAI appears to be on a path toward replicating this angsty teenage writer archetype in AI form. CEO Sam Altman posted on X on Tuesday that OpenAI trained an AI that’s “good at creative writing,” in his words. But a piece of short fiction from the model reads like something straight out of a high school writers’ workshop. While there’s some technical skill on display, the tone comes off as charlatanic — as though the AI was reaching for profundity without a concept of the word. The AI at one point describes Thursday as “that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday.” Not exactly Booker Prize material. On…