AI wrote a story. David Eggers called it "garbage"

Half of X is fighting over an AI-written story.

A new OpenAI model wrote a short story about grief this week. Half of X wants access to the model behind it, the other half is calling out the output as absolute slop.

OpenAI Sam Altman says they trained this new GPT model on creative writing (He doesn’t elaborate on what type of data). This model isn’t available publicly yet, so AI spammers can hold off on killing short story contests everywhere.

Altman wrote a basic prompt for this model, asking it to generate a short story about AI and grief. It spat out a 1178-word meta-fiction short story.

I spent a few years in my twenties taking short story writing classes and entering contests. Those creative writing workshops taught me that true storytelling is about emotional authenticity, not just predicting what words come next.

AI, in this case, generated a story from the point of view of an unnamed, self-aware AI system. The system recounts the story of how a grief-stricken user named Mila used AI after a loss. AI’s meta-fiction premise is good and I liked the direct tone.

I know Hokum when I read it, though. The story is clunky, clichéd-ridden and, worst of all, forgetable. David Eggers called it “pastiche garbage”. As much as AI is changing how I work, I’m on Eggers’s side.

Creators worry AI will put them out of the job. But large language models like ChatGPT and Claude aren’t going to replace your creativity any time soon. They’re simply representations of training datasets and prompts.

Hokum in, hokum out

AI can, however, amplify your best work. Come up with a good dataset or training info… and you’ll get what you want. Input a bad one… and well, you get clickbait for X.

If you’ve got a great idea for a piece of content or an offer, AI can help you expand that idea and turn it into reality. It can take you off the content hamster wheel and free up that creative white space you’re craving. And it can also translate your ideas into code.

But… the onus of coming up with a compelling story or taking a creative work from conception to completion falls on you, the creator.

It’s this creative heavy lifting—not prompt engineering—that separates memorable content from forgettable filler. It’s harder work than word-wrangling. But it’s the only work that matters.

Side note: Don’t waste your money on AI detection.

I copied the short story from Sam’s X into a few different popular AI detection tools, which I won’t name and shame here.. After running a quick check, they all reported the story as nearly 100% human!

If you need help with applying your creative skills to AI, my premium newsletter PromptWritingStudio is open. Several times a week I share my best prompts and techniques for using tools like ChatGPT, and Claude with creators. It can help you amplify your creativity. It only costs $25 per month.

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