Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?

The explosion of em dashes and negation (“it’s not X, it’s Y”) in LinkedIn posts and college essays over the past few years has an obvious culprit, and it rhymes with “fartificial fintelligence.” But rather than relying on pedantic ire, Sam Kriss sets out to take the measure of AI writing’s sundry and various shortcomings. Required reading for the next time someone tells you that “no, it’s actually quite good!” Good for data analysis, sure. Good for compelling prose? Maybe not quite.

What nobody really anticipated was that inhuman machines generating text strings through essentially stochastic recombination might be funny. But GPT had a strange, brilliant, impressively deadpan sense of humor. It had a habit of breaking off midway through a response and generating something entirely different. . . . When I tried to generate some more newspaper headlines, they included “A Gun Is Out There,” “We Have No Solution” and “Spiders Are Getting Smarter, and So, So Loud.”

I ended up sinking several months into an attempt to write a novel with the thing. It insisted that chapters should have titles like “Another Mountain That Is Very Surprising,” “The Wetness of the Potatoes” or “New and Ugly Injuries to the Brain.” The novel itself was, naturally, titled “Bonkers From My Sleeve.” There was a recurring character called the Birthday Skeletal Oddity. For a moment, it was possible to imagine that the coming age of A.I.-generated text might actually be a lot of fun.