In a new novella, “Death of an Author”, the writer, Aidan Marchine, describes a subpar plate of nachos this way:
The cheese was congealed and the chips soggy, damp and smeared with a greasy film like some kind of lake scum. Gus forced himself to take a bite, but the flavor was rancid, a sickly sweet imitation of cheese. He washed it down with a swig of beer, but even that tasted ugly, like it had been sitting in the sun for too long.
…Pushkin Industries, an audio production company, will publish the novella next month as an audiobook and e-book. Even the moniker “Marchine” is an invention of a program, a combination of Marche and machine.
In January, Jacob Weisberg, Pushkin’s chief executive, approached Marche, who has been writing with and about artificial intelligence since 2017. He asked if Marche was interested in using the technology to produce a murder mystery. The result of that collaboration is “Death of Author”, in which an author who uses AI extensively winds up dead.
Whodunit? Was it her estranged daughter? Was it the professor of crime and cyberfiction who was an expert on her work? Was it the eccentric billionaire who worked with her on a secretive AI project?
To coax the story from his laptop, Marche used 3 programs, starting with ChatGPT. He ran an outline of the plot through the software, along with numerous prompts and notes. While AI was good at many things, especially dialogue, he said, its plots were terrible.
Next, he used Sudowrite, asking the program to make a sentence longer or shorter, to adopt a more conversational tone or to make the writing sound like Ernest Hemingway’s. Then he used Cohere to create what he called the best lines in the book. If he wanted to describe the smell of coffee, he trained the program with examples and then asked it to generate similes until he found one he liked.
“To me, the process was a bit akin to hip-hop”, he said. “If you’re making hip-hop, you don’t necessarily know how to drum, but you definitely need to know how beats work, how hooks work, and you need to be able to put them together in a meaningful way.”