“Quite mundane and linear”: A reader reacts to our ChatGPT story

Last week I read an AI generated short story published in your paper, and I think it's safe to say I disliked it.

Personal grievance towards AI aside, the story was quite mundane and linear, it had little to no substance on a cognitive/emotional level. Furthermore, the sentence structure and syntax was quite clunky in places, and unnecessarily redundant. For example,  "They knew that even in the darkest of times, there was still beauty and happiness to be found." 

The use of even and still in the same sentence conveys the same meaning twice, and can be deemed as grammatically incoherent. 

Mind you, this email does not mean to encourage the improvement of AI generated writing. Any writer worth their salt would stand against the AI takeover of the arts.

Since the dawn of its time, writing has been a means for human connectivity. It has been a way for the writer to communicate with readers, convey their own ideas, which the readers could ponder over, eventually reaching their own conclusions. Writing has primarily been a wholly human exchange.

The gravity of writing has always come from the writer. A piece of literature cannot be judged without the whys and hows, and these questions are impossible to answer without sentience.

These questions are what differentiate between literature and an array of words on a page. And so, I cannot but refuse to accept AI generated art as real art.

I admit this email has become a critique on the broader subject of AI's contribution in this field, but it is evident that a story no matter how well written, when written through AI, fails to gain a position in the literary world. 

One can assume I'm a bitter traditionalist, afraid of change and losing my place in this world. But my worry is not the loss of myself, it is more the loss of our humanity, as a whole.

That is my opinion on the ChatGPT story, and I sincerely hope you agree.