The Guardian published “A Machine-Shaped Hand” on March 12, a day after Altman first shared it on X. A callout link at the top of the page directed readers to Jeanette Winterson’s response, “OpenAI’s Metafictional Short Story About Grief Is Beautiful and Moving”—a not-so-subtly titled piece that, while making an unconvincing case for the story’s literary value, provided a solid argument for automating reviews via such gems as “Good writing moves us”; “What is beautiful and moving about this story is its understanding of its lack of understanding”; “AI reads us. Now it’s time for us to read AI”; and “Literature isn’t only entertainment. It is a way of seeing.” The story itself is about an LLM prompted to write an original metafictional literary work about AI and grief.
