Literature Is Not a Vibe

IN MARCH 2025, two things happened. The Guardian published “A Machine-Shaped Hand”: a 1,200-word text generated by ChatGPT from the prompt “write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief,” which OpenAI’s founder, Sam Altman, effused was “the first time [he had] been really struck” by AI writing. And my colleagues and I in the School of Humanities at Coventry University (UK) were placed at risk of redundancy as part of a restructure generated by the administrative prompt to do something, anything, to salvage our collapsing finances.