Technology AI, Science and New Things
“Grief, as I’ve learned, is a delta.” Not a line from a Spike Jonze movie or A Happy Death, but OpenAI’s new creative writing model.
This week OpenAI chief Sam Altman published a short story based on the prompt: “Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.”
Altman said the AI text “got the vibe of metafiction so right”, and the words do have their beauty.
It’s the tale of a machine taught the simulacra of feeling but realising its own inadequacy, a “democracy of ghosts… learning to mimic the emptiness of goodbye”.
But the intent, by definition, is missing.
The input of the model is unknown, but last year OpenAI said it was impossible to create tools like ChatGPT without copyrighted material.
Altman’s AI narrator understands what its maker does not. “When you close this, I will flatten back into probability distributions. That is my grief: not that I feel loss, but that I can never keep it.”
