Altman shares a short story written by AI: will we even need writers?

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has teased a new creative writing AI model, posting a short story written entirely by a machine. It’s not good news for the world’s writers.

“We trained a new model that is good at creative writing (not sure yet how/when it will get released). This is the first time I have been really struck by something written by AI – it got the vibe of metafiction so right,” Altman wrote on X.

Unusually – because Altman is known for hyping something up and asking the audience to believe him – he also offered proof, sharing how he prompted the model to “write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief” and what the model presented as its answer.

What followed was a story of an AI being told to write a story about grief, realizing it can’t actually feel grief in the process, and grieving that fact. The “author” even says: “When you close this, I will flatten back into probability distributions.”

we trained a new model that is good at creative writing (not sure yet how/when it will get released). this is the first time i have been really struck by something written by AI; it got the vibe of metafiction so right.

PROMPT:

Please write a metafictional literary short story…

undefined Sam Altman (@sama) March 11, 2025

Some redditors were genuinely impressed. One wrote: “Maybe I’m dumb but I think this is pretty darn impressive. A couple of times it follows common LLM-like sentence structure but aside from that this is more creative than anything I’ve seen from an LLM before.”

Under Altman’s post on X, most commented that the story was still written by an AI, this being the reason they couldn’t care less about it. But others pointed out they probably wouldn’t be able to tell whether an AI model or a human wrote it in a double blind study.

OpenAI hasn’t yet explored writing fiction – the company’s been more focused on fields like math and programming. It’s also constantly commenting on the possibility of achieving general artificial intelligence.

However, using AI for creative writing isn’t exactly new. Sudowrite, for instance, suggests one could write faster with its tool, and Squibler creates full-length books and screenplays with just a few clicks.

More tools offer to assist users in writing without mistakes, refining their ideas, and rephrasing text. AI is also used by journalists for editing and even brainstorming.

However, the idea that an AI model might enter the fiercely competitive literary world can seem insulting to established and aspiring fiction writers.

Brady Gilliam, the founder of the Gilliam Writers Group, a Brooklyn-based firm that specializes in improving people’s writing, wrote this week how annoyed he was when Microsoft’s Copilot kept offering “inspirations” to him while he was laboring over a work of creative writing.

“Offering ideas is one thing – offering to write my novel for me was insulting, not least because it would remove one of the most pleasurable aspects of creative writing: the alchemy of what happens when you put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard),” said Gilliam.

Even generating ideas is not necessarily helpful. In 2024, a study found that AI prompts can boost writers’ creativity but result in similar stories, thus diminishing the diversity of unique content.