‘It is a beast that needs to be tamed’: leading novelists on how AI could rewrite the future

Novelists and poets, Bernardine Evaristo, Jeanette Winterson, Stephen Marche and others, consider the threats and thrilling possibilities of artificial intelligence

ChatGPT seems to have blindsided us all. In less than a year it has proved that it can make writers redundant, which is one of the reasons why the Writers Guild of America recently went on strike, and why a group of novelists, including Jonathan Franzen, Jodi Picoult and George RR Martin, are pursuing a lawsuit against OpenAI, the company that owns the chatbot. The worry is that its monster brain is rapaciously, unscrupulously scanning the internet and suctioning up all the knowledge and writing contained therein, including copyrighted works, which it then metamorphoses into its imitations of creative writing - poems, novels, scripts, essays, you name it. Imitation that appears to be original writing.