Introducing "Man or Machine?," a newsletter exploring the intersection of literature and AI

For the past couple months, I’ve been obsessed with generative AI … just like everyone else, it seems.

I love writing, and I love reading even more. So it wasn't long before I started asking ChatGPT, OpenAI's generative language learning model, to write stories on a wide range of subjects.

I was disappointed at first. Most of the stories were overly simplistic, pedestrian, clichéd. They tended to contain info dumps at the beginning, and ended with summary conclusions that read more like the end of an essay than the conclusion of a piece of fiction.

But as I toyed around with it, I found I could get ChatGPT to rewrite its stories, refining them into something halfway decent. If I told it to use less exposition and use more descriptions and dialogue, it would do it! If I told it to write like Cormac McCarthy, Ernest Hemingway, or Elmore Leonard — or a combination of all three — it seemed to do a pretty good job emulating their writing styles! Before long, I had ChatGPT producing what I thought were pretty decent stories.

I started to get excited. I wanted to share these stories with the world. I thought about compiling them into a book (being sure to disclose that all the stories had been written by AI chatbots), but other people were already publishing books penned by AIs, and I didn't like the idea of jumping on a bandwagon. Plus, AI generated writing is in a sort of limbo currently when it comes to copyright. Publishing a book consisting solely of AI generated content just didn’t seem like the way to go.

Then I got an idea. What if I published a book containing both human- and AI-generated stories? Ten stories written by me, ten written by AI. The twist? The reader doesn’t know which stories are which until the end.

I liked this idea for a number of reasons. First, it has an interactive element to it. It’s less of a book and more of a guessing game. Second, contrasting the AI’s writing with my own highlights the similarities and differences between writing produced by a human being, and that produced by a language learning model. In isolation, it’s far too easy to dismiss AI generated writing as simplistic mimicry. But if you don’t know if the story you’re reading was written by a human or an AI until you’ve finished it, would you be able to dismiss the AI’s writing so easily? I wasn't sure, and this book seemed like a good way to find out.

That book was Man vs Machine: Exploring the Intersection of Literature and Artificial Intelligence. I also published a companion book called Man vs Machine: Rematch, in which I took the ten stories I wrote for the first book and had the ChatGPT and Bing chatbots write their own versions of my stories to see if they could outdo me.

But I didn’t want those books to be the end of it, which is why I created this Substack. The concept is simple: Each week, I’ll publish a short story on here, along with a poll where readers can vote whether they think it was written by me or an AI. The next week, before delving into a new story, I’ll share the results of the poll and reveal whether the story was written by man or machine. And I’ll keep doing that, every week, until eventually, someday, I stop.

But hopefully that won’t be for a long time.

For the time being, this Substack will be free. I think I’ll institute a paid tier in the future where I’ll offer additional content beyond the stories, but we’ll see how the free newsletter does first.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to check out this newsletter! I hope you’ll subscribe and participate in this little experiment to disentangle man and machine … if that’s even possible in this day and age.

Now get reading!