OpenAI Says Its LLM Can Write Creatively

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Sam Altman recently tweeted that OpenAI has trained a model that’s good at creative writing, asserting that it was the first time he’d been “really struck by something written by AI.” While the unnamed model isn’t publicly available yet, Altman gave us a glimpse of its potential by sharing a prompt—“please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief”—alongside the 1,172-word narrative it generated.

Reactions to Altman’s tweet were mixed—some were deeply moved by the AI’s story, while others dismissed it as trash. But I think debating the literary merit of the piece misses the point. The model’s demo begs a deeper  question: are large language models capable of writing creatively? 

When we judge whether AI can write creatively, we’re really expressing our own beliefs about what creativity is—not something many of us spend much time thinking about. We may think we know it when we see it, but putting “it” into words is surprisingly difficult. Is originality an illusion, a deft trick of taking in data about the world and parsing and rearranging it? Or is it rooted in some ineffable aspect of human experience? Or is it something else entirely: a subjective judgment that’s open to interpretation by whomever is interacting with the creative work? 

As I tried to get to the bottom of these questions, I found a bunch of fascinating ideas about how creativity might work in machines. One thing I did not find is a black or white answer to the question of whether LLMs are our next great literary talent. It turns out it depends a lot on how we, the humans in this story, look at things. 

Machines and theories of creativity 

More than two decades before Altman’s tweet, cognitive scientist Margaret Boden published a paper on creativity and artificial intelligence. Boden theorized that creativity came in three broad types:

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• How we define and measure creativity in machines
• One way that AI's creative capacity hasn't changed despite explosive progress
• Why humans are a critical part of defining creativity