Death of an Author Prophesies the Future of AI Novels

Death of an Author doesn’t try to hide many of the quirks that come from collaborating with ChatGPT, which favors Thomas Pynchon-esque monikers, like a literary agent named Beverly Bookman, and fake book titles, such as God, Inc. and Tropic of Tundra. One character walks away “like a record being put back in its sleeve.” Workers at a tech company are compared to “digital mountaineers scaling the face of God for a sprig of robotic edelweiss.” Multiple characters are described as “glowing,” but a fictional version of author Michael Ondaatje gets the most luminous treatment. Augustus, the staid, academic protagonist, refers to his estranged spouse as “wifey.” At another point, he seems unaware of one of the biggest biographical facts of the murdered author’s life, even though he’d been studying her work for years. One prompt might be something like “Describe the death of an author in the style of CBC news.” The next might be “Write Augustus’ response to this death.” The computer can’t keep track of the minutiae of plot and character, leaving holes in the process. Marche even said as much to The New York Times: “I am the creator of this work, 100 percent.” What’s striking, though, is what he says next: “But on the other hand, I didn’t create the words.” It’s important to meditate on this renunciation of authorship because it seems central to current misunderstandings about what LLMs are and why they make us so nervous.