Can AI write good fiction – an experiment
- Chris Godfrey
- Dec 15, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: Dec 16, 2025
George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘1984’ was first to propose the idea of machines writing fiction for the masses. In his telling, stories were automatically created without human intervention. Typically, these works were sappy romances and light erotica, simple essays that gave easy entertainment to the proles. The technology was cold and mechanical but it did it's job. Human thought had been eliminated from the art of story telling. Pesky authors were no longer needed.
We wondered if this was possible.
Could machines really create convincing fiction that required nothing more than a short prompt to get them started? In the age of Big Tech and Gen-AI, could machines create a short work of fiction on their own?
We decided to experiment.
The prompt
We gave ChatGPT 5.2 the following information:
“Create a 3000 to 4000 words short story around the following theme: Greg is an ordinary man, mid-30's, no wife, no family, living in an ordinary town in Mid-West USA. He works as a data analyst at a faceless corporation and leads a boring, repetitive life. One day he receives a package at home that he did not order. Inside the package is a small device that only has one button and a printed message that says: 'Press to change your life'. It's beguiling, but strangely tempting. Who wouldn't want to change their life in some way? However, Greg is a cautious man. He conducts extensive research before taking the plunge. But he cannot find out who makes the device, what it does and why it was sent to him. All he can see are thousands of social media posts where people gush about the wonderful effect the device has had on their life. Conflicted to the end, Greg decides to take a chance. He presses the button to change his life. What happens next should have a sci-fi element, with a twist that the reader will not expect. What happens to Greg? Is he happier at the end, or are we left wondering about his fate? You decide. US English.”
You’ll see that we asked the LLM to make it’s own conclusions regarding title, structure and ending. It was not guided in any way.
The story
Click the link below to see a PDF version of the results of this collaboration. There has been no human editing or further AI editing. This is the first draft, warts and all.
The critique
Apart from its unnecessary length (6711 words instead of the requested 4000) and the persistent use of one-line commentary, the end result is reasonable. It could certainly form a good base for development – perhaps into one hour TV such as ‘Black Mirror’.
Positives:
Good use of detail
Good structure
Creates a strong sense of moral conflict for the protagonist
Sets a final dilemma that only the reader can answer
Negatives
Too verbose
Pacing is slow
Ending has been seen before
The reader has no reason to root for the protagonist
Overall, we feel that with a strong human edit the draft could be made into a satisfactory story in three or four hours – giving a total creation time of less than 250 minutes, far quicker than any fully human work could be produced.
However, efficient as this is, there’s an underlying problem: The LLM did not create this story from its own imagination – it does not have one – instead, it wrote the draft using references from existing science fiction writing: Bradbury, Bester, Philip K Dick, Asimov, HG Wells, George Orwell and many others.
Of course, one could argue that there are only seven basic types of story in the world and all writers borrow from other works. But, in those circumstances, what is borrowed is not used as is, it’s reformed into whole cloth by the writer’s experience, perspective, bias and temperament. Human qualities that AI does not have.
Our conclusion: The draft is not an original work of art it’s a facsimile.
Final word
Yes, machines can write passable fiction and at the current rate of AI development, the results will certainly get better. However, the output will always be a shadow of the real thing – a mere tracing of real human thought that risks becoming as repetitive and boring as all the other slop we see online.
Unfortunately, as creative businesses succumb to the financial pressures created by this technology, it seems unlikely that publishers will hold the line against this an AI takeover. There’s just too much money at stake - which begs the question - how long before many of the books we buy are written by code not human creation? Ten years, five years, two years? Less?
Now that’s an original scary thought to process.
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