The first time I played the tabletop game Fiasco, it wasn’t the story my friends and I made that blew me away. It was the realization that I had just experienced the limitless possibilities of collaborative writing, that the novels I loved featured just one way their narratives could have played out. Alice could have transformed the Mad Tea Party into Wonderland’s first organic tea shop. Don Quixote could have devolved into a windmill-killer for hire.
Later I realized the similarities between tabletop games and ways novelists challenge their narrative choices, from literary constraints to automatic writing to William Burroughs’ cutup method. Sometimes authors even bring in collaborators, be they humans or machines.
The newest collaborative machine that has everyone talking is, of course, ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM) often called artificial intelligence, although its cognizance is nonexistent. Working with ChatGPT, an author inputs a prompt request and can choose from an infinite number of outputs. If you don’t like a paragraph ChatGPT wrote, you can edit your prompt and ask it for another one. These tools can guide anything from character names to plot points. “Alright, ChatGPT, that character in my sci-fi story is a member of the Merry Men? OK, let’s try Robin Hood in outer space.”
Death of an Author, by Stephen Marche, is the best example yet of the great writing that can be done with an LLM like ChatGPT. Not only is it an exciting read, it’s clearly the product of an astute author and a machine with the equivalent of a million PhDs in genre fiction. ChatGPT read basically the entire internet and all of literature, finding billions of parameters that go into “good” writing.
At the level of narrative, Death of an Author reads like your everyday detective novel, following a scholar of crime and cyber fiction named Augustus Dupin as he races to clear his name while uncovering the greatest mystery of his life: Who killed his favorite author, Peggy Fermin? An AI? A human? An AI posing as a human? And why?
The story is full of holographic avatars and deceitful tech CEOs, as well as everything you might expect from crime fiction: mysterious letters, hidden codes, nosey journalists, and gruff cops. Clever Easter eggs are hidden throughout the text, referencing the history of mystery novels. The protagonist’s name, for example, is a nod to Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, while the dead author’s funeral reads a lot like the beginning of And Then There Were None.
Death of an Author doesn’t try to hide many of the quirks that come from collaborating with ChatGPT, which favors Thomas Pynchon-esque monikers, like a literary agent named Beverly Bookman, and fake book titles, such as God, Inc. and Tropic of Tundra.
Descriptions also bear an alien, computer imprint in their discordant and nearly nonsensical images. One character walks away “like a record being put back in its sleeve.” Workers at a tech company are compared to “digital mountaineers scaling the face of God for a sprig of robotic edelweiss.” Multiple characters are described as “glowing,” but a fictional version of author Michael Ondaatje gets the most luminous treatment. At one point his “hair was a glistening white, and it radiated a soft aura around him” and later his hair is “radiating a soft aura.”
The LLM voice is also apparent in several out-of-character moments. Augustus, the staid, academic protagonist, refers to his estranged spouse as “wifey.” At another point, he seems unaware of one of the biggest biographical facts of the murdered author’s life, even though he’d been studying her work for years. These slippages are byproducts not only of the LLM’s idiosyncrasies but of a human author’s process in composing a novel with LLMs the only way currently possible: piecemeal.