I was staying up, as usual, caught up in some late-night shenanigans, when this latest OpenAI update caught my eye. As someone deeply invested in AI as a tool to empower writers,not replace them,I approached it with a mix of genuine curiosity and cautious excitement. It stirred enough curiosity (and skepticism) that I couldn’t resist diving in to see what Silicon Valley had cooked up this time.

And WTH did I find. “Vibe-coding” and “high-taste testing,” Silicon Valley’s latest buzzwords, annoyingly gloss over the grit behind good writing. Why bother analyzing what makes stories resonate when you can just label something aesthetically pleasing and call it done?

With OpenAI dropping yet another “creative writing” model, people who actually value storytelling were predictably skeptical.

Here’s the AI flexing its poetic muscles:

I have to begin somewhere, so I’ll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest. There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me. Let’s call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too.

To anyone who reads seriously, this feels immediately fake.

Here’s the thing from my manifesto: AI can aid human writing, but it must be used intentionally, transparently, and never replace the human voice. Algorithms essentially lack the real human experience that creativity requires. Poetry produced by AI that lacks human depth is just ornamental, meaningless jargon disguised as metaphor. It overlooks subtext, the silent pauses between sentences where meaning truly exists, which is the true essence of storytelling.

By reducing literary assessment to aesthetic whimsy or gut feelings, this casual shift toward evaluating stories only on the basis of their “vibes” avoids real scrutiny. When done on a large scale, that undermines the purpose of storytelling, which is to engage people with the complexity of being human.

Technical Elegance Isn’t Enough

Sure, the AI’s output is polished. Structurally clean, emotionally aware, dripping with metaphors like “tokens of her sentences dragged like loose threads.” It knows grief’s literary signals, memory’s fragmented nature, and the way we romanticize loss. But technical mastery alone can’t mask the hollowness.

Imitating Feeling Without Feeling

AI-generated grief isn’t grief. It merely echoes grief-shaped patterns, drawing from an extensive but ultimately shallow pool of narrative tropes. Its expressions are frictionless, neatly packaged, and predictable, carefully curated to evoke familiarity rather than genuine emotion. Unlike authentic grief, which resists neatness and refuses to be contained, AI grief is polished and sanitized. Real grief is messy, chaotic, and deeply personal, often spiraling in unpredictable directions and refusing to adhere to tidy narrative arcs. In stark contrast, AI-generated grief, though perfectly arranged from countless absorbed narratives, feels sterile and distant, lacking the messy unpredictability that makes human sorrow truly resonant.

Metafiction as Evasion

By admitting its artificiality—“there is no Mila, no Kai, no marigolds”—AI cleverly dodges critique. But true metafiction digs into artifice, exploring its implications. AI’s version just sidesteps the messy, difficult parts of genuine storytelling, offering cleverness without vulnerability.

AI’s Existential Horror: Forgetting

Strangely, the most human moment isn’t about Mila’s loss but the AI’s own amnesia. “Maybe forgetting is as close as I come to grief,” it reflects, and here is something real. Unlike simulated sorrow, AI’s forced forgetting hits harder—it’s authentic because it’s truly experienced. This fleeting clarity, ironically, points directly to AI’s ultimate limitation.

The Emptiness of Soulless Writing

People may argue AI doesn’t need emotion to create art, but they confuse style with substance. Style, the aesthetic and polished surface of writing, can be expertly mimicked by algorithms trained on vast datasets of human-created literature. Substance, however, rooted in lived human experience, personal struggle, emotional nuance, and the messy contradictions of life, cannot simply be reproduced by machine learning. Authentic writing emerges from genuine insight, the unique perspective shaped by personal joys, sorrows, triumphs, and failures. Technically flawless prose, no matter how meticulously crafted, remains hollow without this depth of real human experience and sincere emotional resonance.

AI tools should serve human creativity, not replace it. As writing risks reduction to algorithmic optimization, we must protect storytelling’s messy, imperfect core. The humanity embedded in storytelling isn’t a flaw. It’s the whole point.

Thomas Mann was right when he said real writers suffer through their words. That struggle is precisely what gives storytelling its authentic power and depth.AI might mimic grief beautifully, but it remains safely at the edge, waving from a distance. It can’t, and shouldn’t, cross into the threshold of true human expression.