‘A machine-shaped hand’: Read a story from OpenAI’s new creative writing model

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,…