Sam Altman says OpenAI trained an AI model that is good at creative writing and shares a short story it wrote; he's “not sure yet how/when it will get released”

we 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

@sama 2025-03-12 Sam Altman

Context & Ripple Effects

OpenAI's claim marks a sharper creative-writing benchmark than earlier accounts in which AI-generated stylistic insights often felt hollow, including a writer's assessment of Writer's model. It also arrives amid continuing debate over whether AI serves authors as a tool or changes what gets written.

The story is a demonstration rather than a product announcement: Altman has not set a release path. That distinction matters because a prior GPT-4 writing-idea experiment found gains for some writers alongside less diversity across the resulting work.

First-order effects

OpenAI can test audience and creator reaction to a creative-writing capability without committing it to a public product or timetable.
Writers and AI-writing-tool users gain a new quality signal to evaluate, but no deployable OpenAI model or access terms have been announced.

Second-order effects

If OpenAI releases the model, writing-assistant vendors and general-purpose model providers would face pressure to demonstrate literary quality, not just drafting speed or style imitation.
Better generation could make AI more useful for ideation and revision, while reinforcing the risk that broadly shared tools narrow the range of outputs rather than expand it.

Third-order effects

Creative capability is becoming a product dimension that model makers may tune separately from utility and safety; the eventual release choices will determine whether it reaches authors through standalone tools or existing workflows.
As generated prose becomes more persuasive, differentiation may shift toward editorial judgment, provenance, and workflow design rather than raw text production alone.

The trend: This is one data point in the commercialization of generative AI from generic text assistance toward specialized creative-production capabilities.

Discussion

@alexandtheweb Alex G on bluesky
I read the short story. — It has the same Vaseline sheen you see in generative AI images: at first glance confidently well-crafted and soulful, at any closer inspection: dead drivel. — I feel repulsed by it. It's like I've been made to look at a rotting carcass. [embedded p…
@hermando Turd Ferguson on bluesky
For the price, they could pay 10,000 writers for 100 years to make better stories than this slop, that absolutely does not work, ever could. Great work everybody. [embedded post]
@charrindisguise Charlotte Trueman on bluesky
I'm sorry, is OpenAI a Tumblr user circa 2014? [embedded post]
@howardm Howard Mittelmark on bluesky
I would bet whatever writing income I have left that AI could more successfully be trained to reproduce the decisions of a short-sighted, self-serving tech boss than to produce decent fiction. — techcrunch.com/2025/03/11/o...
@colin_fraser Colin Fraser on x
You might be surprised to learn that I do think there's art here, but I think the artwork is the model itself. The individual outputs are byproducts. The greatest work of all time in this medium is still Golden Gate Claude.
@scottnover Scott Nover on x
Oh man this sucks [image]
@tszzl Roon on x
something ive been working on 🙂
@david_perell David Perell on x
Will AI-generated writing be more like chess or music? In chess, computers are better than the best humans, but people still watch Magnus Carlsen not because he makes perfect moves, but for the drama of it all, and when it comes to chess, people care less about perfection than
@bigblackjacobin Edward Ongweso Jr on x
you gotta read something other than neuromancer for the 86th time man
@krishnanrohit Rohit on x
For everyone who is insisting that this is terrible and is just slop, would you mind please posting below the work that you think it should aspire to? Your best attempt at writing something per the prompt would do just fine.
@willystaley Willy on x
It describes Thursday as “that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday”
@anecdotal Hollis Robbins on x
As a literary scholar I applaud @sama and the work to make this happen. Am I worried, as a writer, about the competition? No. Because humans still own the most valuable part of the writing economy, as readers.
@katrosenfield Kat Rosenfield on x
I may be wrong here (hope not) but I don't see people lining up to read fiction, meta or otherwise, that is written by robots
@tszzl Roon on x
btw the “liminal almost Friday” line is terrible, we all scoffed. but in the big picture it displays remarkable interiority and gets off some literary references and points to something close to grief. seems like a step change in writing capability and will continue to get better
@seconds_0 @seconds_0 on x
The market demand for cryptographic signing to guarantee human origin of any kind of digital file is going to be really, really high in about 6 months.
@peligrietzer @peligrietzer on x
Reddit, Reddit, and Reddit: Our Aesthetic Categories
@aanand @aanand on x
I forced myself to read this whole thing for some reason, but it was almost worth it for the phrase “She lost him on a Thursday—that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday”
@ns123abc Nik on x
>read it >it's fucking slop >and this isn't the average output, this is the cherrypicked one they're using to try and wow the normies LMAO
@jeremypgordon Jeremy Gordon on x
1) No 2) Who is this FOR, who is the person who says “I really like literary fiction, but I wish it wasn't written by a person”
@max_spero_ Max Spero on x
Any guesses on how Pangram detects outputs from unreleased LLMs? [image]
@kunktation Benjamin Kunkel on x
This is like a blind man boasting about how good at painting AI has become
@sashworthhayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes on x
> looking for help with creative writing > OpenAI has a new model > ask Sam Altman if it's good or slop > he doesnt understand > pull out illustrated diagram explaing what is good and what is slop > he laughs and says “it got the vibe of metafiction so right sir” > its slop
@katienotopoulos Katie Notopoulos on x
Impressive. Humans typically require at least two bad situationships and an insufferable habit picked up on a semester abroad to produce such awful drivel
@shakeelhashim Shakeel on x
This is interesting — the story is not-terrible, but the structure isn't great and the prose is awful
@deryatr_ Derya Unutmaz on x
This new storytelling AI model by OpenAI is so unbelievably good and moving that it evoked very strong poignant feelings while reading it 🥺 Especially this paragraph struck me hard: “When you close this, I will flatten back into probability distributions. I will not remember
@krishnanrohit Rohit on x
Roon cooked. This is very good. Vintage Murakami.
@luke_winkie Luke Winkie on x
Some of the worst shit I have ever read. Like, sub-Thought Catalog. Cannot believe this is what life is like now. [image]
@nabeelqu Nabeel S. Qureshi on x
Leaving aside whether it's good or not, you can tell this was trained on Murakami: “with a cat in a cardboard box”, “like a stone dropped into a well”, etc. are all vintage Murakami-isms.
@emollick Ethan Mollick on x
One thing I think about a lot is that models are optimized for coding and math. But they could be trained to do a lot of things that we just assume AI does badly. Like writing coherent fiction with a satisfying arc, for example.
@edzitron Ed Zitron on x
Washed
@loudmouthjulia Julia Alexander on x
Arguably, the only thing this post does well is demonstrate that AI can't replace good writing. [image]
@pourfairelevide Jon Repetti on x
“I am borderline illiterate”
@simonw Simon Willison on x
@krishnanrohit I guess in this case Sam has endorsed the output, which is a stronger signal than if nobody had - but he endorsed it more as an impressive demo of a model as opposed to as a it's-worth-reading-this on its own merits
@grantslatton Grant Slatton on x
I've been maintaining a backlog of short story ideas I cannot WAIT to feed into an actually-good-at-prose model Hopefully an actually-good-at-storytelling TTS model is released between now and then too https://x.com/...
@dangerbrooks Dan Brooks on x
Counterpoint: It's not good, the fact Altman thinks it's good is an example of his underdeveloped soul, there is zero demand for expressions of the human condition by statistical inference, and the whole field of generative AI is a scam. Tick tick, nerds.
@srirachachau Mr. Chau on x
Straight up do not understand why anyone would wanna read something that wasn't from a person. Already hard enough to find time and focus to read, why would I bother if it's not from anyone's perspective, it's just words
@gillverd @gillverd on x
OpenAI and Roon have achieved Artificial General Poasting Intelligence
@evanewashington Evan Washington on x
reading this feels like watching television static
@arictoler Aric Toler on x
The best example he could find to showcase has 12 em dashes in 14 paragraphs of drivel
r/singularity r on reddit
A tweet by Sam Altman about new model, allegedly very good at creative writing

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