Dwight Garner at the NY Times:
Now comes a new novella, “Death of an Author,” a murder mystery published under the pseudonym Aidan Marchine. It’s the work of the novelist and journalist Stephen Marche, who coaxed the story from three programs, ChatGPT, Sudowrite and Cohere, using a variety of prompts. The book’s language, he says, is 95 percent machine-generated, somewhat like the food at a Ruby Tuesday.
Well, somebody was going to do it. In truth, other hustlers out there on Amazon already have. But “Death of an Author” is arguably the first halfway readable A.I. novel, an early glimpse at what is vectoring toward readers. It has been presided over by a literate writer who has pushed the borg in twisty directions. He got it to spit out more than boilerplate, some of the time. If you squint, you can convince yourself you’re reading a real novel.
more here.