Grandma’s Cabin

A couple of months ago a member of my writing group submitted a piece for our monthly creative writing exercise by a mystery author. He would not say who they were. He asked us to read and critique it in the usual way and to share our thoughts at the meeting.

The task was to write a short story of between 500 and 5000 words that began with the line ‘The snow was falling heavily, making it nearly impossible to see out of the window.’ I wrote a darkly comic tale of a woman alone in a remote cabin in a snowstorm, while her husband goes out for pizza. Let’s just say her imagination runs riot. We had a scary story about an apparently innocent child who turns out to be the spawn of Satan, and a disturbing ghost story about a woman on a lonely writer’s retreat.

We then discussed Grandma’s Cabin, the mystery submission. It was a strange tale about Amanda who is travelling by train to visit her grandmother in her remote mountain cabin. A terrible storm forces the train to stop. After this the story rapidly develops into a crazy nightmare involving an encounter with a creepy man and a random gunfight. Amanda leaves the train to fight her way through the snow to her grandmother’s cabin, which is conveniently located close to where the train has stopped, only to discover that Grandma has had her throat slit. Grandma has left a note revealing that she was murdered by the creepy man who has followed Amanda to the cottage, but a pre-warned Amanda shoots him with Grandma’s shotgun.

We all looked at each other quizzically, unsure what to say about the truly dreadful story. Who had written it? Was it someone we knew? Was the member who submitted it going to be hurt or offended by our comments. We needed to know something about the author. Perhaps they were child or someone with a learning disability, in which case we would be inclined to mitigate our criticisms accordingly.

We started tentatively, but when it was clear that we all felt the same we let rip. Badly written. Unbelievable. Naïve. Childlike. Cliched. Ridiculous plot. Lacked depth. Poor characterisation. No atmosphere. No elegance to the prose. Utter nonsense. And on and on.

When we had vented, we asked our colleague to reveal the identity of the mystery author. With a wide grin he announced that it was an AI engine called ChatGPT. We were stunned initially and then delighted. Writers across the world are currently freaking about the threat of AI. If this was the best that it could do, what was all the fuss about?

But, our colleague insisted, to be fair to AI and, in the context of a bad worker always blames his tools, all the AI had been given was the first line and an average word count. Most examples of AI involve the computer working with more information and alongside a human writer. His words got me thinking. What if, with more information and human support, AI could write a story as good as, or even better than ours? What if we were unknowingly competing with AI in the many writing competitions we regularly entered. ChatGPT had taken only a couple of minutes to write Grandma’s Cabin, while we had spent hours and days perfecting our stories. The NYC Midnight competitions typically allow 24 hours for participants to generate short stories based on a random prompt. It can be a tough challenge. How could we possibly compete with an AI writer that could produce multiple stories in the 24-hour period? What might it mean for the future of writing and people who write for a living?

After the meeting, I did a bit of research on the subject. I came across an article about the author Stephen Marche who co-authored a novella, Death of an Author, with three different AI programmes (ChatGPT, Sudowrite and Cohere) under the penname Aidan Marchine. Marche created the plot and the characters, and the machines wrote the text. It was a trial-and-error process involving a lot of work on his part. His conclusion was that AI could be a useful tool for authors but not something that would ever replace them. The book has only just been released. It will be interesting to see what the reviews are like.

The idea of a human and AI working together then got me reflecting abut a novel I read recently, In the Blink of An Eye, by Jo Callaghan. In this crime novel, as an experiment, a human detective works alongside an AI detective to solve a series of murders. The conclusion here was that both detectives had an important role to play but that one would not have succeeded without the other. While the AI detective is logical and objective, and able to process huge volumes of information in just a few minutes, the human detective picks up on subtle human behaviours and emotions that are pivotal to the case.

Similarly, I can see a place in the future for AI as a support tool for writers, helping with grammar, sentence structure and word choices, as many writing support programmes already do. It could also be useful in terms of creating concise and impactful blurbs and social media posts. More worryingly, it isn’t hard to imagine scenarios where it is the main content creator of business reports, academic papers, marketing copy and even some non-fiction books and articles.

Some of my favourite books contain subtle nuances and observations of the human condition, dry humour, elegant sections of prose that stir the senses and emotions, moving stories of the unfathomable depths of love, loyalty, and friendship. Good writing is art. Yahoo Dictionary defines art as ‘the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination … producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.’ Surely an AI writer couldn’t produce art?

Could they?