Can AI Write Better Fiction Than Us? You Be the Judge

In our ever-changing world of evolving technology, it’s too interesting and entertaining to experiment with AI. I had to give it a try and see if the uniquely human art of storytelling is destined to become another appendage of technological capability.

So . . . I gave an LLM three fiction-writing challenges to see what it could come up with. Here are the results:

Nanofiction

I decided to start off with a small challenge. I asked AI to come up with two original pieces of nanofiction.

Nanoficiton typically refers to stories under 100 words — sometimes as few as a single sentence. These are stories as distilled as poetry, often relying on implication rather than exposition. Some famous works of nanofiction are Hemingway’s six word story:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

And Frederic Brown’s two sentence horror story:

“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.”

These stories rely on heavy emotional impact, irony, or suspense to affect or thrill the audience. Can AI deliver the same condensed punch?

Here are it’s two attempts:

“He whispered her name into the urn, just once, before locking it away.”

“She deleted the last message from her dead mother. It arrived again, marked ‘unread.’”

Overall, I can’t say I’m impressed. While the technique is fine and the story implications somewhat interesting, the stories lack the deeper emotional impact of great nanofiction. There’s no originality of thought.

But let’s see how AI handles my next challenge.

Novel Idea

I asked an LLM to come up with an original, compelling premise for a novel. Here’s what it came up with:

Title: The Echo Code

Genre: Speculative Thriller / Near-Future Sci-Fi

Premise:
In 2038, a linguist discovers a mysterious dialect embedded in the speech patterns of people who have never met — across continents and generations. The dialect isn't natural language evolution — it's a pattern seeded by something non-human. As she deciphers it, she realizes the language is not only alive, but it's learning. And it may be using humans to write its own story — one that ends with our extinction.

Themes:
Language as a living organism, consciousness in code, the ethics of AI, fate vs. free will.

I have to say, I was more impressed with this result. Though very strange, it’s an interesting premise. I can’t say whether this is a completely original idea, but I would read this novel. How about you?

And because I was impressed, I decided to let AI run with the idea for my third challenge.

First 100 Words

I asked AI to write the first 100 words of the novel it thought up. Here they are:

The Echo Code — Opening (100 words)

It began with a lullaby in a language that didn’t exist.

Dr. Isha Varma leaned over the scratchy audio recording, fingers hovering above the waveform as if touch alone could coax out its meaning. The child’s voice was distant, warbled, but beneath it was a rhythm — too measured, too structured to be a coincidence.

“Same patterns. Again,” she murmured.

She had heard them weeks ago in an elderly man’s sleep-talk on the other side of the world. Now, from a girl in Mumbai who had never left her home.

The language was spreading.

And no one else seemed to notice.

Again, not bad. AI came up with a great first line and an intriguing opening.

So, nanofiction? Meh. Novel idea? Has potential. First 100 words? Surprisingly compelling.

Overall, AI has a ways to go in creating the same emotional impact and originality that we can. However, it’s still fascinating to see what technology is capable of. At the moment, I think AI is a powerful tool authors can use to problem-solve, generate ideas, and edit prose. Can it write the next great classic? Probably not yet. But maybe soon?

Let me know your thoughts!