And then the Guardian editors took the best outputs and spliced them together into this one large op-ed." Still, according to Porr, the Guardian editors reported that the process was easier than, or at least comparable to, working with a human writer. But Parrish, an assistant arts professor at NYU who uses AI to craft verse, argues that computer-generated poetry is a new frontier in literature, allowing for serendipitous connections beyond anything human brains can create. While GPT-3 is not available for use by the general public, according to Porr, I could interact with it through a story-generating game called AI Dungeon, run by Latitude, a company purporting to make "AI a tool of creativity and freedom for everyone." Using the program, I could enter a line of text and it would produce a follow-up line that would presumably advance the plot. It's like the writing game "exquisite corpse," where a group of writers passes around a folded piece of paper on which only the previous line is visible as they construct the next line, but in this case, my co-conspirator was a computer program, trawling the internet for patterns in human-generated text, alchemizing gigabytes of language from the web into narrative. So, in fact, this tool is useless."

Asking a bunch of literate people about the Great American Novel is an open invitation for us all to show off and make cogent, compelling arguments about the importance of [insert a favorite novel here] in the canon of American literature, regardless of whether anyone outside our small circle of literary compatriots knows of the novel or would agree. As a science fiction and fantasy writer, for example, I can make a pretty good argument for Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle" or Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451," or maybe even Mark Helprin's "Winter's Tale," and I might even get a cheering section behind the choice. Ubiquity: It has to be a novel that a relatively large number of Americans have read, and that a large proportion of those who haven't read it know about in other ways (for example, by a popular filmed adaptation). Notability: There has to be a general agreement that the novel is significant -- it has literary quality and/or is part of the cultural landscape in a way that's unquestionable (even if critically assailable). Morality: It needs to address some unique aspect of the American experience, usually either our faults or our aspirations as a nation, with recognizable moral force (not to be confused with a happy ending).