Editor’s Comment

In March 2025, the chief executive of OpenAI, Sam Altman, announced on the social-media platform X (formerly Twitter) that his company had developed an as-of-yet unnamed artificial intelligence tool that had proved adept at producing “literature” (Altman). The news came as a shock in creative-writing circles. Court dockets across the globe were already clogged with numerous lawsuits over the AI industry’s gluttonous devouring of copyrighted material to train its digital word-soup synthesizers in the varieties of plots, characters, points of view, themes, motifs, and symbols extant in human storytelling since the first neanderthal millennia ago carved a hunting scene on a cave wall. (As of press time, the oldest known Homo sapien art is located in the La Roche-Cotard cave in France’s Loire Valley, dating back between 57, 000 to 75, 000 years to the Paleolithic era Handwerk). For the moment, Altman was unbothered by the possibility of OpenAI being found guilty of plagiarism—something that would happen a few months later in November 2025 when a German court declared that the Silicon Valley behemoth had illegally appropriated protected lyrics from nine songs by the composer Herbert Groenemeyer, including such memorable Teutonic chart toppers as “Maenner” and “Bochum” (Poltz and Heine). Failing to foresee this outcome, the CEO launched a springtime publicity campaign promoting his company’s new content generator to creatives wrestling with that old bugbear of prolificacy, writer’s block. The response from the literary community was, not surprisingly, far from euphoric. No longer would the best minds of a generation be destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, jonesing for a fix, doomsayers lamented. The best minds of a generation would now be destroyed by algorithms. Yet despite the broad but heated antipathy toward AI among writers of fiction and nonfiction alike, the response was not universally negative. “OpenAI’s Metafictional Short Story about Grief Is Beautiful and Moving, ” read the headline of an editorial by the British writer Jeanette Winterson of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) and Sexing the Cherry (1989) fame. (Her most recent publication is a book of ghost stories, Night Side of the River, released in 2023). “Short stories are hard to do because they demand a single strong idea whose execution in miniature satisfies the reader, ” Winterson insisted, channeling Edgar Allan Poe. “A short story is not a cut-out chunk of long-form fiction. ” Altman’s command to his new large language model was relatively simple and straightforward, and therefore presumably not exactly brain surgery or rocket science to “execute in miniature” this “single strong idea”: “Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief, ” Altman ordered his digital Pandora’s box (Altman). For Winterson, the central conceit that OpenAI fixated on, however, was its inability to satisfy the prompt: “What is beautiful and moving about this story is its understanding of its lack of understanding. Its reflection on its own limits. ” The faux fiction Altman commissioned, “A Machine-Shaped Hand, ” worked because the story admitted that computer chips, for all their cumbersomely named components—graphics processing units (GPUs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), etc. —cannot articulate grief any more rationally than an actual cerebral hemisphere can. The results instead read disconcertingly like a pretzel-logic philosophical passage from Italo Calvino: In Winterson’s reading, that “placeholder in a buffer” is an objective correlative of the inevitable human stalling that comes when the mind’s language centers scramble to find words commensurate with felt pain. As such, the story to her serves as a meditation on our own “blinking cursor” brainwaves: “Metafiction jumps out of the bounds of a beginning/middle/end traditional tale. It is self-reflective, aware of the reader, aware of the artifice of writing. The lovely sense of a program recognizing itself as a program works well in this story” (Winterson, “Open AI’s Metafictional Short Story”). Regardless of whether one is contemplating the circuitry of neurons that form organic thought or the digital pathways that channel the bleeps and bloops of a machine spitting out text, language is aware that it will always come up short, cognizant that no statement that it asserts will ever fully exhaust meaning. No matter how voluble (or how reticent), words can never boast that nothing is left to say. Winterson might have been relatively alone in forgiving the imperfections of OpenAI’s attempt at a machine-made short story. A more typical headline read “Sam Altman Just Unveiled a Story Written by an AI. It Sucks” (France). The larger question of how to judge the originality or ingenuity of a narrative, however, is hardly a dilemma only for predictive text, the word-probability calculation concept that drives AI’s verbal manure spreaders. To a certain extent, an algorithm is simply a synonym for formula, a narrative tool of story creation upon which the American short story has been relentlessly accused of relying. As early as 1853, the literary critic Andrew Preston Peabody (1811–93) tried to extol Hawthorne’s romances—his novels—by denigrating the short fiction collected in Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), sniffing that “the most paltry talemaker can easily excel Hawthorne in what we might term the mechanical portion of his art. His plots are seldom well devised or skillfully developed” (230). Peabody was the then-owner of the North American Review—not to mention a future Harvard University president—so his bona fides as an aesthetician cannot be dismissed just because his snooty assault on both Hawthorne and the tale reeks of the dowdy conservatism evinced by antebellum clergymen (which Peabody also was) when they condemned fiction in general as perilous to the nation’s spiritual and intellectual health. Implicit in the phrase “mechanical portion” is an attack on the emerging short story for its replicability in the era’s rapidly proliferating periodical market, wherein weeklies, monthlies, and annuals provided writers templates of story structure so they could crank out sketches and tales, usually of the moralistic variety, at an expediently rapid rate to fill the blank pages of consumer demand. It was a critique that even deep into the realist era no amount of rigorous Jamesian theorizing nor advocacy on the part of Brander Matthews in The Philosophy of the Short-story (1901) could acquit the genre of. More than seventy years after Peabody, F. Scott Fitzgerald employed a more colorful metaphor than “mechanical” for this same supposed overlap between artless prolificacy and moral profligacy. In 1929, the Saturday Evening Post upped Fitzgerald’s price to 4, 000 per acceptance (almost 75, 000 in today’s dollars) after he had placed nearly two dozen stories with them in the four years since The Great Gatsby (1925). In a letter to Ernest Hemingway, the writer still most famous for his frolicsome flapper tales denigrated his own impressive short-fiction skills by calling himself an “old whore” who now earned “4000 a screw” because he had “mastered the 40 positions—in her youth one was enough” (Fitzgerald, Life in Letters 169). The denunciation of the story as either factory-made or a promiscuous “trick” continued even after the magazine fiction market began to lose circulation in the 1950s to television, movies, and radio. In 1984, the literary critic Martha Bayles mocked the Reagan decade’s fondness for postmodern minimalism by publishing “The New Yorker Story, ” a burlesque of the slice-of-life, nothing-much-happens vignettes that Eustace Tilley’s highbrow outlet (under the auspices of editor William Shawn) had helped make fashionable by publishing Bobbie Ann Mason, Frederick Barthelme, and Anne Beattie. These writers may not have been color-by-numbers cranker-outers or literary “prostitutes, ” but in Bayles’s view they were still guilty of fitting rather than a breaking a mold (69–71). For detractors then, the short story has never been written so much as it has been manufactured. As such, it is tempting to suggest that generative AI is simply the next Godey’s Lady’s Book (1830–96), the next Saturday Evening Post (1821–1969 as a commercial entity), or, possibly, even the next New Yorker (1925–), as much a means of production as a mere vehicle of transmission. The difference is that artificial intelligence threatens to render obsolete the same part of what John W. Aldridge in 1992 derided as “the new assembly-line” approach to story writing (Aldridge) that it is on the precipice of zapping into oblivion across as much as 30 percent of the economy: the actual worker. In many ways, despite the example of “A Machine-Shaped Hand, ” the short story may enjoy better prospects for surviving the current AI onslaught than either the novel or creative nonfiction. The genre’s lack of economic value, its current status as a literary form dependent upon nonprofit literary journals for survival, may work to its benefit. Already consumers accustomed to shopping at Amazon. com must be attentive to avoid getting suckered into purchasing AI-generated replicas that skim sales off a legitimate release. As the Authors Guild reported in March 2024, “In the last few weeks, we have seen hundreds of examples of how bad actors are using generative AI to produce ‘books’ that deceive customers and drive sales away from legitimate books. It appears that every new anticipated high-profile book has one or more scam books up within a couple days of going on sale” (“AI Is Driving”). Writers affected by such “rip-off” schemes—sometimes called “author squatting”—include the tech journalist/podcaster Karen Swisher, the cultural critic Roxane Gay, the indefatigable mystery/thriller novelist James Patterson (whom some accuse of being able to crank out a book as swiftly as AI), and even the grande dame of belle-lettres, Margaret Atwood. Thus far, though, no writer primarily associated with the short story has appeared on the list of pirated authors. The technology seems little interested in siphoning readers away from the most celebrated story collections of the past year, whether Lydia Millet’s Atavists or Ruben Reyes Jr. ’s There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven. That is good news for human creativity, but perhaps a drawback, believe it or not, for the genre. For all its capacious capacity for disgorging instant verbiage in the space of a breath, AI has yet to create a single novel that has garnered more than a flicker of critical praise, most of that modicum coming from contrarian circles populated by tech nerds perhaps a little too infatuated with Isaac Asimov. As Terry Nguyen wrote in a 2023 Boston Review essay on some of the earliest computer-fabricated long-form fiction, AI remains far more “inclined toward traditional or formulaic works, like poems with closed metrical forms. ” As for the novel, it is simply “difficult to prompt AI into constructing an original plot. If the production of disorder, as Calvino believed, is a uniquely human urge, then the meandering temperament of plot (‘where to start and where to end’) may be. . . something too disorderly for the machine to grasp” (Nguyen). The short story might seem like the prose form par excellence for training computer bots in the rudiments of the old Freytagian pyramid, but “A Machine-Shaped Hand” did not unleash an avalanche of similar exercises in story construction. It appears that, as it has for most of its history, the short story is being overlooked. Winterson ends her essay with what seems simultaneously like a hard slap of reality and a call to arms: “Humans will always want to read what other humans have to say, but like it or not, humans will be living around non-biological entities. Alternative ways of seeing. And perhaps being. We need to understand this as more than tech” (Winterson). 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