“The writing is vivid, but there’s nothing particularly unusual about it. Aidan Marchine, however, is an unusual author — at least for now — because Aidan Marchine is a set of computer systems. Kind of. ‘I am the creator of this work, 100 percent,’ Marche said, ‘but, on the other hand, I didn’t create the words.’”
Image Credit: Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York Times
The novella, “Death of an Author,” has been written by a set of three artificial intelligence programs with extensive plotting and prompting from Stephen Marche. The novella tells the story of an author who uses AI extensively and ends up dead. Marche used three programs: ChatGPT, Sudowrite, and Cohere to write the story. Marche said that the process could be a tool for writers and was optimistic about the growth of algorithmic writing in his field.
However, many writers and their representatives worry that machines will put writers out of a job, and the Authors Guild has called for legal and policy interventions that balance the development of useful AI tools with the protection of human authorship.