Critic slams LARB's ChatGPT literary take: one story and a few prompts isn't research
0xSammy · x · 2026-09-06
akpiper criticizes the Los Angeles Review of Books essay 'Literature Is Not a Vibe: On ChatGPT and the Humanities' for judging AI writing from a single generated story and a few prompts, arguing the right approach is systematic multi-model, multi-prompt research with explicit quality criteria.
The LARB piece's backdrop: in March 2025 the Guardian published 'A Machine-Shaped Hand', a 1,200-word ChatGPT-generated metafiction that Sam Altman called the first AI writing that truly struck him — while the author's humanities school at Coventry University faced redundancy. Per the UKHE Shrinking project, 99 UK universities and 40 arts and humanities departments have undergone restructurings since 2020, concentrated at institutions serving underrepresented students.
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