Hi y’all,
This missive is coming at you from the Amtrak train to DC. We’re in the quiet car, but the people next to us keep talking. I’m gathering up my courage to politely, respectfully shush them. In like, a friendly way.
Spotted: Is reading Camus on the train cool? I think it’s a little too Gigi Hadid. This girl’s in all billowy black and big headphones and a tiny silver cross on a chain around her neck. We’re on the L train to Manhattan. Later, on the 1 train to the UWS, another girl in all black, but this bitch is basic. Not even a chance of being cool. She’s reading Big Summer by Jennifer Weine. Her dress is a short-but-wide number, and she has a giant heart tattooed on her leg.
Another woman in all black! Thinking Through Animals, which I now know is an overview of the emerging field of “critical animal studies.” It’s a slim book. She’s a slim lady. She’s in black flats with pointed toes—I don’t like pointed toes, but she’s looks great. She’s annotating her book with a green Muji pen (respect). She’s “aging gracefully,” very “gallery chic.” She reminds me of my coolest English teacher from high school.
For the record, I too am wearing all black. I’m in my favorite jumpsuit, which I bought several years ago from Urban Outfitters. It has a bunch of holes in it. I have three different bags wrapped around me (a backpack, a fanny pack, and a tote bag). I’m the picture of assistant. I’m not reading, I’m writing in my phone.
Short Stories by Siri
Oh my god, do I have a freaky one for you today.
Stories by AI is a Substack with a name that pretty much says it all. Each post is a short story, created by speculative fiction author Celeste Kallio using Sudowrite, an AI that can take your prompts and turn them into stories. I’m not going to pretend like I understand how it works, but I am here to report that it does, and that I’m a little freaked out. Kallio and her partners Sharon Zhu and Andrey Kurenkov also animate and narrate each story using other AI technology.
Okay, I admit, I was pretty dismissive of the whole AI thing at first. I’ve seen the DALL-E drawings everyone’s freaking out over, but like, it’s one thing to make an image that looks cool, another to write a coherent, meaningful story.
And then I tested out Sudowrite.
There are several methods of using Sudowrite. The one I tried lets a writer insert the first paragraph of a story (or essay, or blog post!!!), and Sudowrite generates a few options for potential next paragraphs. And, um, they’re not horrible.
I put in a pretty simple paragraph from a story I wrote a few years ago:
My room was the only one on the first floor. Kendra and Sara’s rooms were on the second, and Addie on the third. The stairs were loud, old, wooden, but I tried to take them silently. The air in Sara’s room was sun dusty and hot in the soft light through her curtains. The room smelled like her, like baby powder. Sara sat straight up in bed, holding her phone with disgust and total rapture. She was still in her morning glasses, big blue and horn rimmed and never worn out of the house, her blonde hair piled on top of her head in a sleep-messy bun. She looked up at me, mouth open, eyes wide, the picture of shock. I sat down next to her, pulled her thin knit blanket over my knees.
Not a lot happens in the paragraph, but it’s a turning point, and obviously something big needs to happen next. I was curious how Sudowrite would handle it. Um, it did a pretty great job:
"What? What is it?" I whispered.
Without looking away from the screen she handed it to me.
On it, her phone wallpaper was a photo of Addison and me. We were at the beach, under the pier. My hair was bleached white, and I was leaning back against Addison, who had his arm around me. We were looking into the camera, smiling. Sara had taken the picture.
I stared for a moment, then turned the phone around again.
"This came in a text?" I said. Sara nodded, still staring at the phone.
"And you don’t know anyone who has that number," I said. I could feel my fingertips burning, the edges of my hair itching.
"No," she said, "no one I know."
I put my head into my hands, felt my hair on my neck, my shoulders, my arms. I felt my face, my lips. "Sara."
Obviously that needs a fair amount of editing, but like, holy shit. I’m pretty impressed that it picked up that the phone has to be an important plot point. It also did a spookily good job of mirroring my tone and style.
Next I asked it to generate a new second paragraph to follow my original piece, but for the style to be “fantastical.” Here’s what it wrote:
"What?" I whispered.
"Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god." She whispered, still staring at her phone. I grabbed the phone from her hand, looked down at the picture. It was a selfie of her, Kendra, and Addie, taken on the roof of the library. In the background, the sun was setting and the sky was on fire. The three of them were smiling, their heads thrown back in laughter, their arms around each other. I could see the glee in their eyes, the love.
I handed the phone back to Sara, who was still staring at it in disbelief.
"What the hell?" She whispered.
"I don't know." I whispered back. "But it's magic."
Y’all. I’m so deeply shook. Like, the fact that I didn’t feed it any dialog, but it still does a decent job at writing their voices?!?! And that passage above is straight up eerie. It sounds like a speculative novel.
Okay, I could give y’all examples all day long, because I’ve had a great time playing around with it, but really, you should just check it out for yourself. It’s totally insane. Even when the AI produces nonsense, there can be something charming in the inanity.
In one scene that I fed the AI, someone accuses my protagonist of being an alcoholic. The protagonist denies it, and then I let the AI take over. It wrote this from the protagonist’s perspective:
I was as sober as a person could be and still be breathing, so I was shocked and it hurt.
Which is just such an incredibly funny thing to think while denying having a drinking problem. I love it.
Anyway, I’m totally enraptured and pretty terrified and kinda excited by this. I’ll have to write a longer blog post about it, because there’s really quite a lot to think through. Maybe one day I’ll even have the AI write this newsletter for me!
That’s it gang! I’m cutting some of my usual columns because I want to keep these newsletters reasonably short. Next week we’ll go back to the usual set up.
Let me know in the comments or via email what you think of Sudowrite. Are you scared of AI? I’m ambivalent. On the one hand, it’s frightening. On the other, I’m not that frightened. Idk. I think I should be. Maybe.
Alright, I’ma get back to enjoying the train.
tschuss tschuss,
Book Notes
As someone who is currently reading Myth Of Sisyphus on her daily commute, I feel attacked