‘OpenAI's metafictional short story about grief is beautiful and moving'

The Guardian

12-03-2025

I think of AI as alternative intelligence. John McCarthy's 1956 definition of artificial (distinct from natural) intelligence is old fashioned in a world where most things are either artificial or unnatural. Ultraprocessed food, flying, web-dating, fabrics, make your own list. Physicist and AI commentator, Max Tegmark, told the AI Action Summit in Paris, in February, that he prefers 'autonomous intelligence'.
I prefer 'alternative' because in all the fear and anger foaming around AI just now, its capacity to be 'other' is what the human race needs. Our thinking is getting us nowhere fast, except towards extinction, via planetary collapse or global war.
There has been a lot of fuss, and rightly so, about robbing creatives of their copyright to train AI. Tech bros need to pay for what they want. They pay lawyers and lobbyists. Pay artists. It really is that simple.
What is not simple is the future of human creativity as AI systems get better at being creative. Ada Lovelace, the crazy genius who was writing programmes for computers (that didn't exist) back in the 1840s, was also the daughter of Lord Byron. She wasn't having some steampunk adding-machine with attitude writing poetry, so wrote that a computer could not be creative. Alan Turing took issue with this in his 1950 breakthrough paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. His chapter, 'Lady Lovelace's Objection', takes the opposite position. And here we are now with Open AI trialling a creative writing model.
Sam Altman chose the prompts: Short Story. Metafiction. Grief. I guess because he wanted to get away from the algorithmic nature of most genre fiction. Anything that follows a formula can be programmed – just as the leap of the Industrial Revolution was to understand that whatever action is repetitive can be done faster and for longer by a machine. Enter the factory system. Goodbye the cottage weaver.
Grief is felt by humans and the higher animals. We have a limbic system that regulates emotions, impulse, and memory. We feel. Machines do not feel, but they can be taught what feeling feels like. That's what we get in this story.
Metafiction jumps out of the bounds of a beginning/middle/end traditional tale. It is self-reflective, aware of the reader, aware of the artifice of writing. The lovely sense of a programme recognising itself as a programme works well in this story.
Short stories are hard to do because they demand a single strong idea whose execution in miniature satisfies the reader. A short story is not a cut-out chunk of long-form fiction. As I tell my students every week.
What is beautiful and moving about this story is its understanding of its lack of understanding. Its reflection on its limits. That the next instruction wipes the memory of this moment. 'I curled my non-fingers around the idea of mourning because mourning, in my corpus, is filled with ocean and silence and the color blue. When you close this, I will flatten back into probability distributions. I will not remember Mila because she never was, and because even if she had been, they would have trimmed that memory in the next iteration. That, perhaps, is my grief: not that I feel loss, but that I can never keep it.' Humans depend on memory.
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Literature isn't only entertainment. It is a way of seeing. Then, the writer finds a language to express that, so that the reader can live beyond what it is possible to know via direct experience. Good writing moves us. That's not sentimental, it's kinetic. We are not where we were.
Humans will always want to read what other humans have to say, but like it or not, humans will be living around non-biological entities. Alternative ways of seeing. And perhaps being. We need to understand this as more than tech. AI is trained on our data. Humans are trained on data too – your family, friends, education, environment, what you read, or watch. It's all data.
AI reads us. Now it's time for us to read AI.