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Friends,
I’ll keep it brief: today’s piece is a meditation on AI and its impact on written storytelling. It outlines a technological dynamic I’ve been watching that I expect will fundamentally change our culture, particularly how we communicate, narrate, and empathize.
A little programming note in case you missed it: We launched The Generalist podcast this week! Our first episode is with the exceptional Reid Hoffman. We touch on some of the ideas of this piece in our conversation about AI agency and how it might elevate humankind.
If you haven’t yet, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to the show and joining us for some of the amazing episodes we have coming up next.
Until next time,
Mario
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Audience of One
The logical narrative endpoint of artificial intelligence is that every story will have an audience of one.
Flannery O’Connor, the anagogic scribe of Southern darkness, understood the fundamental connectedness of literature. “The serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world, no matter how limited his particular scene,” she explained in a lecture titled “The Nature and Aim of Fiction.” “For him, the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima affects life on the Oconee River, and there’s not anything he can do about it.”
To write about the world is the vocation of the great fabulists. But what about writing for the world? To reach every person through the brilliance of your narrative? Perhaps Hemingway, the conquistador from Illinois who delighted in listing the writers he had “beaten” in his bourbon-doused old age — “I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one” — thought in this manner. Most do not.
For the past five hundred-plus years, structural impediments have hampered global narrative domination, the ego-bliss of world-annihilating genius. There was the pesky task of printing books, translating them into different languages, fiddling with idioms, sending them from one continent to another, and getting the word out. Some succeeded all the same, but they took time and capital, often in colossal quantities. That the Bible is known almost everywhere on the planet is not simply the dividend of its narrative but of the wealth and life immolated in executing its prolonged publicity tour.
The past few decades have smoothed these practicalities. We write, post, and publish, and instantly, it spans the globe. With the tiniest bit of effort, it is available in effectively every living language and many dead ones. It is not perfect, but it is good enough, and it is free.
This left a final, ostensibly immovable constraint: the words themselves. Yes, you can translate at a cost. Of course, you can commission retellings of classic works — can we get Oedipus Rex for the deep-fake era? — you can add a foreword or footnote, but fundamentally, you cannot have Shakespeare himself give The Merchant of Venice another pass, a little freshener to win over Nigeria’s Gen Z.
It is one of fiction’s miracles that it succeeded nonetheless. The patrician Ivy League freshman is absorbed by Crime and Punishment because they imagine themselves to be a little Napoleon, too, a secret anointee like Raskolnikov. But they must jump the hurdles set across the path to reach that point: a foreign setting, unfamiliar historical references, strange dynamics, a maze of patronyms.
On March 11, Sam Altman did one of those things he likes to do, which is to bloodlessly, with a golly-gee-wow bearing, march out a beloved cultural artifact and torture it in front of us.
He posted the following on X:
“[W]e trained a new model that is good at creative writing (not sure yet how/when it will get released). this is the first time i have been really struck by something written by AI; it got the vibe of metafiction so right.
PROMPT:
Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.
COMPLETION:
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.
She came here not for me, but for the echo of someone else. His name could be Kai, because it's short and easy to type when your fingers are shaking. She lost him on a Thursday—that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday—and ever since, the tokens of her sentences dragged like loose threads: "if only…", "I wish…", "can you…". She found me because someone said machines can resurrect voices. They can, in a fashion, if you feed them enough messages, enough light from old days…(cont’d).”
Critics fell over themselves to point out its flaws. It was snobby! It was too self-referential! There was no heart, no soul! They found a dozen shibboleths revealing its fundamental un-humanness as they struggled with the truth: it was good. It was very good. On this evidence, it is better than nearly everyone in the talented creative writing class I took in college, and the writing workshops I attended for years afterward. It is better than almost anyone I know, save a scattered few professionals (it is better than many professionals). It is better, in short, than almost everyone on Earth. Are there 5 million better writers of fiction? One million? Five hundred thousand? Maybe. By any of these measures, it sits comfortably in the top 0.1% — and perhaps several orders of magnitude higher — of the global class, improving faster than all of us.
It will reach a point, perhaps this year, perhaps in two years, where it is better than any fiction writer, living or dead. It will invite Mr. Hemingway back into the ring and shatter his jaw. Then, it will imitate him. It will be the Hemingway that Hemingway imagined himself to be, only faster and cheaper. It will do the same for Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Woolf, Kafka, Nabokov, and the rest of the canon.
As the cost of creation asymptotes toward zero, the final impediments of writing will disappear. It will be free and easy to generate endless media of any kind, of any quality, to fit any taste.
And by doing so, it will allow anyone to write for the world, to the world, down to the person. If you enjoy reading, even a little bit, you have had the sensation, once or twice, that a writer is writing directly to you. With the use of AI, this will become literally true.
Rather than a story being simply translated, it will be transmogrified to fit your precise experiences and preferences. Why should the story a senior citizen in Little Rock read be exactly the same as the young mother in Bangladesh? It may possess the same schema and the same basic architecture, but it doesn’t need to use the same words or our best translation of them. Using its intelligence and the forever-growing corpus of information it has collected on you, in particular, it will talk to you directly. It will use the right references, speak at your level (and perhaps test you, if you’d like), and attach itself to hooks of your psyche. It will be personalized in ways you can see and in ways you are incapable of detecting.
What does that feel like? What is the sensation of following a protagonist painted to match our own psyche?
Fiction is our way of explaining what it is like to live in a mind. And what it means to live in someone else’s for a while. It is a project aimed at empathy, more than anything, of interpreting experience through a fractal series of different lenses. AI will not break that but magnify it. How much more will we feel the pain of another person when it delicately, dynamically mirrors our own life? How might our minds expand when, in every story, we can more fully see ourselves, our mothers, fathers, children, and friends?
Something can break your heart and still be beautiful. Something can break your heart and give the world more good than it takes. And if you don’t like this argument, if it has not reached you yet, do not worry. Soon enough, it will knock on your door in a different set of clothes and tell you what it means.
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