ChatGPT wants to write your next novel, and readers and writers alike should be very worried

• OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, has shared a metafiction short story written by AI
• He claims the new ChatGPT creative writing model is the best AI writing he's ever read
• There's no timeframe on when this new AI model will launch to the public, but should it even exist?

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the company is working on a new ChatGPT model that is good at creative writing and marks the first time he has been "really struck by something written by AI."

The new ChatGPT model doesn't have a name or a release schedule, but Altman clearly thinks this new creative writing tool could overhaul the way we use AI for writing fiction.

In his post on X, Altman shared a full metafiction literary short written by ChatGPT about AI and grief. The story itself is bizarre to say the least, taking on tropes of creative writing to generate a work that AI deems metafictional. The opening paragraph reads, "Before we go any further, I should admit this comes with instructions: be metafictional, be literary, be about AI and grief, and above all, be original. Already, you can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight—anonymous, regimented, powered by someone else's need."

Until this point, AI's ability to write creatively has always yielded a sort of soulless stylistically-void attempt at recreating what ChatGPT finds from its training, and while Altman's example is definitely an improvement compared to asking ChatGPT 4o to do the same thing, it begs the question as to why would I even want AI to attempt creative writing?

Creative writing without the creativity

As AI finds its way into every aspect of our lives, the constant pushing and pulling between how much we want from artificial intelligence becomes more and more prominent. Creative industries have frowned upon the use of AI, from movies like Oscar-nominated The Brutalist coming under fire for its use of software to enhance Hungarian dialect, to the taboo of using AI for journalism of any sort.

As someone who writes for a living, I only use AI tools to have reasons to write about them, whether that's pitting DeepSeek against ChatGPT for research or using Apple Intelligence to create emojis. It would never cross my mind to use ChatGPT to write an article or to think creatively for me, as the reason I'm able to work as a journalist is because I've honed in skills that make me talented to do so.

This example of ChatGPT's creative writing sparks fear in creative industries and makes authors hope that the general public can weed out the rubbish from the words that they pour their soul into.

With tools like NotebookLM already creating AI podcasts that are indistinguishable from human-created ones, improvements to ChatGPT's writing prowess and an ability to think creatively from a prompt is the next step in making those of us who write as a job to have even more disdain for AI.

ChatGPT's new creative writing model is impressive, but it completely misses the point of why creative writing even exists in the first place, allowing humans to pour their emotions and ideas into words. Who knows if we'll ever see a commercial version of what Altman shared on X, but I sure as hell hope we don't.

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