The Not-So-Great Algorithmic Novel

Tom Comitta, author of the new novel Peoples Choice Literature: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels, is eager to reassure readers that “only” about 25 percent was written by prompting the AI model Playground and then “massaging” its responses into Comitta’s own writing. This fact is mentioned in the introduction and reiterated in metafictional asides later on. Such reminders are necessary because the whole book could easily have been written by a computer. Despite this, it has received praise from award-winning author Jonathan Lethem (“an unusual and brilliant book”), Aarthi Valde of Duke University (“Comitta is a master of literary constraint), and Deirdre Lynch of Harvard (“Comitta is heir, simultaneously, to Laurence Sterne, Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, and Kathy Acker”).