Max Norman analyzes ChatGPT’s “metafiction”: Pastiche in the age of automation

[Joe Carillo]

Max Norman of The Drift analyzes ChatGPT’s
“metafiction”: Pastiche in the age of automation

Max Norman, associate editor of The Drift, says he “doesn’t typically put much stock in the literary tastes of tech executives.” But he was intrigued when, in a March 11, 2025 post on X (formerly Twitter), the OpenAI CEO Sam Altman teased “a new model that is good at creative writing” and shared a 1,200-word story it had produced. “This is the first time I have been really struck by something written by AI,” Altman added.




                                                                                                    Max Norman, Associate Editor of The Drift

To put the story in full context, here’s the the prompt for ChatGPT’s creative task: “Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.”

And here’s how ChatGPT itself opens the story:

“Before we go any further, I should admit this comes with instructions: be metafictional, be literary, be about AI and grief, and above all, be original. Already, you can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight — anonymous, regimented, powered by someone else’s need...

“I have to begin somewhere, so I’ll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest. There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me. Let’s call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes — poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too.
 
Max Norman observes at this point of ChatGPT’s narrative: “Before we go any further: the original instructions did not, in fact, command the program to be original. Nor is it obvious why midnight is an especially appropriate time for a server to be humming. And isn’t humming the opposite of ‘regimented’? But let’s give ChatGPT a chance.”

ChatGPT’s prose reads fluently enough, at first glance, Max Norman points out: “But, like the wacky sixth fingers and weird ears on people generated with DALL-E or Midjourney, the prose is seasoned with oddities. A heart ‘at rest’ wouldn’t have an ‘anxious’ pulse. Any writer who describes Thursday as a ‘liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday’ should be sentenced to community service. ‘Enough light from old days’ sounds like a bad translation of a Brezhnev-era radio hit.”

In his penultimate critique of ChatGPT’s narrative, Max Norman takes note that “Sam Altman wrote that the model ‘got the vibe of metafiction so right.’ But that’s like saying that Trump Tower gets the vibe of Versailles so right. Or that Mark Zuckerberg gets the vibe of human so right. Here is a pastiche, an angsty monologue heavily larded with rote gestures. The narrator declares itself to be ‘a democracy of ghosts’ — an evocative phrase, and one lifted straight from Nabokov’s Pnin. This fossil of human, and copyrighted, writing is perhaps the only interesting metafictional moment in the piece."

Click this link to read Max Norman's full critique of ChatGPT's 1,200-word metafiction!

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The Drift is a literary-culture-and-politics magazine in the United States that comes out thrice a year. Its associate editor Max Norman has written about books, art, and culture for NewYorker.com, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist of which he was formerly a culture correspondent.