Death of an Author: First ‘halfway readable AI novel’, says NYT

OpenAI, the creator of the ChatGPT, boasted a range of applications for the chatbot like writing news articles, essays, stories and even novels. But soon it become clear that the creative projects were not its cup of tea as most of the stories and creative works produced by the chatbot were either generic or incoherent. 

But a recent development has given some hope that artificial intelligence (AI) can probably not only write a coherent but also an interesting story. Stephen Marche coaxed the story from three programs, ChatGPT, Sudowrite and Cohere to write the novella called “Death of an Author.”

Stephen Marche signed the “Death of an Author” under the pseudonym of Aidan Marchine. He called the novella a collaboration between humans and AI tools as  the book’s language is 95 percent machine-generated.

“Death of an Author”, published by podcast and audiobook publishing company Pushkin Industries, is available both as an e-book as well as a podcast. 

‘Death of an Author’ is a murder mystery novel. The novella revolves around a scholar who investigates the murder of a literary icon. Placed as a classic whodunit and sprinkled with twists and turns, the novel has been receiving plaudits previously not seen for any AI work.

In a review, Wired called “Death of an Author” the “best example yet of the great writing that can be done” with the help of ChatGPT like AI. “Not only is it an exciting read, it’s clearly the product of a machine with the equivalent of a million PhDs in genre fiction.” Although it does criticize “descriptions of ‘alien’ and ‘nonsensical imagery’.

The New York Times said, “Death of an Author” is arguably the first halfway readable A.I. novel, an early glimpse at what is vectoring toward readers…If you squint, you can convince yourself you’re reading a real novel”.

The trouble with generative AI is that while it is really good at tasks around analysis and computational reasoning, it is not as efficient in work revolving around creativity, subjectivity, and contextual understanding.

Death of an Author tries to run away from this paradox, and manages to ace it. It has shown that there is a way to train these large language models into creating something that can be called a work of good literature.