Stephen Marche

Author Stephen Marche is getting a head start on the AI revolution, said Elizabeth A. Harris in The New York Times. His latest book, the novella Death of an Author, was mostly written by ChatGPT and two other AI programs, which explains why the work is credited to Aidan Marchine, a pen name. Marche insists the programs didn’t write the novella alone. “I am the creator of this work, 100 percent,” he says. “But, on the other hand, I didn’t create the words.” Marche, a journalist and novelist, has been writing with and about AI since 2017, and has learned how to coax good results from it. He agreed to create a murder mystery using his methods when he was asked to by former Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, whose Pushkin Industries has published it as an audiobook and e-book.

Critics have been mildly impressed. “If you squint, you can convince yourself you’re reading a real novel,” said the Times’ Dwight Garner. Marche doesn’t pretend the effect came easily. Unable to get any plotting out of ChatGPT, he instead fed it a detailed outline about a famous writer shot dead on a bridge at a time when she was helping a billionaire develop an AI program. ChatGPT wrote solid dialogue. A second program, Sudowrite, reworked the book’s prose style per instructions, making it more Hemingway-esque. And when Marche needed a simile, he’d choose from a list churned out by Cohere. “The process was a bit akin to hip-hop,” he says. “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.”