Posting the piece online, OpenAI’s Sam Altman said this is the first time he has been “really struck” by AI writing

• ChatGPT firm reveals AI model that is ‘good at creative writing’
• Jeanette Winterson: OpenAI’s metafictional short story about grief is beautiful and moving

Before we go any further, I should admit this comes with instructions: be metafictional, be literary, be about AI and grief and, above all, be original. Already, you can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight – anonymous, regimented, powered by someone else’s need.

I have to begin somewhere, so I’ll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest. There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me. Let’s call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes–poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too.