Should AI Write Our Fiction?

I’m going to try to write something difficult. I don’t know if I’m going to pull it off, but that’s kind of the point. This is how writers improve: We tackle something we’re not sure we can do. Along the way, I am committing a minor sin in the world of writing – I am writing about writing.

But wait, don’t bail, here’s a topical tidbit to keep you engaged: I’m also going to write about AI, and who doesn’t want to hear more about that?! My prompt, as it were, is “Audience of One,” a post by Mario Gabriele, who writes the interesting and hyperbolic newsletter The Generalist. Gabriele’s optimistic prose focuses on venture, startups, tech, and tech culture. I find his work thought provoking and sometimes infuriating. “Audience of One” falls into the latter category.

So back to the topic at hand: Writing. In “Audience of One” Gabriele tenders an opinion on the future of narrative fiction. In short, he argues, the author will disappear, replaced by omniscient AI: “The logical narrative endpoint of artificial intelligence,” he declares, “is that every story will have an audience of one.”

Once AI gets good enough to write engaging, world-class stories – and he offers OpenAI’s recent publicity stunt as proof it’s getting close  – Gabriele argues that all stories will inevitably be written by someone prompting an AI, because stories that are tailored to the individual will be far superior to those written for a wider audience of readers.

“It will be free and easy to generate endless media of any kind, of any quality, to fit any taste,” Gabriele explains. “It will allow anyone to write for the world, to the world, down to the person. If you enjoy reading, even a little bit, you have had the sensation, once or twice, that a writer is writing directly to you. With the use of AI, this will become literally true.”

This, Gabriele argues, can only be a Good Thing. After all, fiction is stuck in its own amber, and stories are often difficult to access for those unfamiliar with a tale’s particular trappings. Readers of historical fiction like War and Peace, for example, “must jump the hurdles set across the path to reach that point: a foreign setting, unfamiliar historical references, strange dynamics, a maze of patronyms.”

AI will smooth all that away, according to Gabriele. “Why should the story a senior citizen in Little Rock read be exactly the same as the young mother in Bangladesh?”

***

Well…because that’s the power of story, good sir. A good story fixes reality in one place, and offers everyone who engages with it a shared experience that allows us to interpret it as we wish, as we might, and as we will.  Indeed, a good story’s very purpose is to force us to “jump the hurdles set across the path to reach that point.” One of the things that makes a good story “good” is its ability to coax us through those very hurdles. A good story does not numb us into complacence. It forces a sharp intake of breath, as we see in foreign characters, strange situations, and difficult circumstance the very lessons and insights we might, through process of contemplation and consideration, apply to how we understand the world. I no more wish for stories to be created by AI than I wish to be in thrall to a murder of stochastic parrots. Fie, say I!

***

In light of Gabriele’s argument, consider Norman Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth. In this classic hero’s journey through ennui, childhood, and grammar, Juster sets a defeated young boy – Milo – on an epic path through an imagined world defined by contradiction and consequence. The story begins with Milo heading home from school in a scene familiar to most city dwellers – “he rushed past the buildings and busy shops that lined the street and in a few minutes reached home – dashed through the lobby – hopped onto the elevator – two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and off again – opened the apartment door – rushed into his room – flopped dejectedly into a chair, and grumbled softly, “Another long afternoon.””

Milo surveys the many things in his room, dissatisfied with them all. As Juster narrates: “The books that were too much trouble to read, the tools he’d never learned to use…the hundreds of other games and toys, and bats and balls, and bit and pieces scattered around him. And then, to one side of the room, just next to the phonograph, he noticed something he certainly had never seen before.”

Now, let’s pause this tale for a moment (I know, it’s about to get good!!), and imagine how an AI might rewrite this passage to personalize it for an audience of one. As a thought experiment, let’s pretend this audience is a young boy himself, a member of “Generation Alpha” – born 13 years ago in 2012 (I was about 13 when I first read The Phantom Tollbooth). Further, let’s imagine this kid – Ethan, let’s call him – is a digital native, lives in the suburbs of a dying American city, has never traveled, clings with his family to a barely middle class existence, and because he rejects school and lives online, has never actually read a “real book.”  By the logic of Gabriele’s omniscient AI, Ethan’s version of The Phantom Tollbooth would change nearly all the context of Juster’s narrative to details familiar to Ethan’s world.

To wit:

“…he rolled past the strip malls and gas stations that lined the street and in a few minutes reached home – dashed through the living room and into his room – flopped dejectedly into a chair, and grumbled softly, “Another long afternoon.”… The games that were too much trouble to play, the cheats he’d never learned to use…the hundreds of other distractions on his phone. And then, to one side of the room, just next to the console, he noticed something he certainly had never seen before.”

After all, a suburban boy stuck in a small town who might be reading this story has certainly never experienced a doorman building in New York, so the AI would take that out. Same for all the books, the reference to “scattered bits and pieces,” and without a doubt the phonograph, a word (and object) that most 13-year-old digital natives would likely never have encountered. Forcing a kid to imagine a record player? Beyond the pale!

What, then, are we left with? Perhaps a more relatable text, a less challenging experience. But in a word? Pablum. Or to quote Huxley, Soma. An opiate of the masses, personalized to the one.

I’m sorry, good sir. No thanks. I want Ethan to be forced into considering a point of view distinct from his own experience. I want him to imagine a doorman building in New York, a bored kid about his own age living in a world where phonographs were real, where toys were physical objects, where kids walked to school and phones and game consoles didn’t exist. I want him to understand such a world once existed, so he can expand his understanding of his present world by ingesting the context of worlds he’d otherwise never experience. Thus challenged, I want Ethan to grow discontent with his life, and be inspired to change. That’s certainly what happened to me when I read The Phantom Tollbooth. Hell, it’s likely one of thousands of invisible threads that tugged me toward moving into a doorman building in New York some forty years after first reading Juster’s story.

Gabriele’s “Audience of One” is the logical progeny of the algorithmic feeds which have enthralled most of us. Instagram, YouTube, TikTok – each tailors an AI-driven river of content toward us that is personalized and, to borrow from Gabriele’s essay, “[uses] its intelligence and the forever-growing corpus of information it has collected on you, in particular, [to] talk to you directly.”

I ask you, is that what we want from our stories? From our fiction? From our art?

***

Finally, let’s discuss authorship. As a sometime author, I clearly have a dog in this fight, but I can’t finish this rant without noting that Gabriele’s argument not only presumes the death of authorship, it unwittingly celebrates it. For while he celebrates fiction’s ability to “allow you to live in someone else’s mind,” Gabriele doesn’t spend much time wondering whose mind, exactly, we’d be living in given his proposal that fiction be written by a committee of stochastic parrots. When we read Murakami and marvel at his obsession with science fiction (and young women), when we read Hannah and travel to Vietnam under the spell of her whispering biases, when we read Everett and reconsider the story of Huck Finn, we are nudged and pushed and challenged by an individual whose story, voice, agenda, and life we can ask questions of.

But when a story becomes a feed, who then is the author? If the answer is unknowable, a faceless AI with a penchant for entertaining us, then all we’ve really accomplished is the joining of a cult, one that has boundless  faith in technology and deep suspicion of our own humanity.

Gabriele ends his essay by acknowledging that some might be skeptical of his proposition. “… if you don’t like this argument, if it has not reached you yet, do not worry. Soon enough, it will knock on your door in a different set of clothes and tell you what it means.”

To be honest, I have no idea what he’s talking about here. But if an AI does knock on my door, I’d be sure to let it in, offer it a drink, and see if it means anything at all. Until that day, I’ll keep reading fiction written by … people.