Is the age of the literary robot author already here?

Can robots actually write literary fiction? That became the question of the week after the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, shared a sample story from a new AI model which is, apparently, “good at creative writing”. You can judge for yourself by reading the story here. AI – particularly its growing role in the audiobook space – was also a hot topic at London Book Fair, attended by 30,000 publishing industry professionals this week.

For today’s issue, we look at the polarised response to the AI story among writers, which is playing out against an ongoing fight over copyright. We also catch up with the novelist Ben Markovits – who wrote about the modern midlife crisis novel in yesterday’s Saturday magazine – to see what he’s been reading.

“Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.” Where would you go with that prompt? What would your favourite author do with it? We now know where AI might take it, at least. Feeding that instruction into OpenAI’s latest model, the company’s head Sam Altman said the resultant story marked the first time he had “been really struck by something written by AI”. The piece, which now has 6m views on X, “got the vibe of metafiction so right”.

But what do human writers make of it? The Guardian put the question to leading novelists. Jeanette Winterson described it as “beautiful and moving”. For Nick Harkaway, it is “an elegant emptiness”. Kamila Shamsie thought the story “imitative, familiar, staying well within the safe confines of 21st-century Anglo-American fiction” – but if an MA student handed it to her, she would be excited about the work (and never suspect it was written by AI). David Baddiel deemed it “genuinely clever”.

For many authors, the untitled story seems to have done exactly what Kazuo Ishiguro, in uncanny timing, predicted would happen in last week’s Saturday magazine: “AI will become very good at manipulating emotions. I think we’re on the verge of that. At the moment we’re just thinking of AI crunching data or something. But very soon, AI will be able to figure out how you create certain kinds of emotions in people – anger, sadness, laughter.”

Ishiguro – whose 2021 novel Klara and the Sun is narrated by a robot – is among those who have challenged the UK government over its proposals to allow tech companies to train their AI models on copyrighted work unless writers and artists opt out.

“If someone wants to take a book I’ve written and turn it into a TV series, or to print a chapter of it in an anthology, the law clearly states they must first get my permission and pay me”, he said last month. “To do otherwise is theft. So why is our government now pushing forward legislation to make the richest, most dominant tech companies in the world exceptions?”

The proposed copyright exemption, announced at the end of last year as part of a plan to boost the UK AI sector, has been criticised by heavyweights in other creative industries, including Elton John.

In response, the government is now in talks to offer concessions to the plans, exempting certain sectors from the opt-out system, sources told the Guardian last month. However, one music industry insider consulted on the proposals said that “the idea of tearing up copyright law for some sectors but not for others is frankly a nonsense.” The finalised plans are due to be announced later this year.

Every spring I teach a class on the Great American Novella. It’s a kind of gut test of how much you like a book – if you look forward to coming back to it, year after year. You can’t really hide your real reaction from yourself. A few weeks ago I rereadThe Awakening, by Kate Chopin, about a young woman’s attempt to escape the confinement of her marriage in early 20th-century New Orleans. It’s one of those novels that gets ruined for some people by being on the school curriculum, like Lord of the Flies or The Scarlet Letter. But it’s a wonderful book, I’m always pleased to see it again. Almost every interaction feels real enough for you to keep picking away at it, the way you’d go over an argument you had with a friend, to see if you were right or wrong, or why they said what they said. Also, in spite of the tragedy at the centre, it gives you a taste of summer on Grand Isle, in the Gulf of Mexico. Among the things Chopin is particularly good at describing are meals eaten outside and more generally the rhythm of days spent near the water, where the big decision you have to make is when to go swimming.

I’ve also been reading and rereading a lot of road trip novels recently, and it occurred to me that it’s a much bigger category than we usually think. All kinds of book turn out to be road trip stories in their way – like The Hobbit or The Heart of Midlothian. But one of my favourites is still a classic American car novel, Independence Day, the second instalment in Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe series. Frank has given up sports writing to become an estate agent and plans to take his troubled teenage son on a weekend drive to the baseball Hall of Fame. He’s trying to come to terms with middle age, to “maintain reason enough and courage in a time of waning urgency to go toward where your interests lie as though it mattered that you get there.” That line alone is worth the price of admission.