This week has seen writers divided over a story written by an AI model that is "good at creative writing" – at least according to Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT company OpenAI, which is developing the new model. Author Jeanette Winterson, writing in the Guardian on Wednesday, agreed with him, calling the story – which is a metafictional piece about grief – "beautiful and moving". We asked other authors to assess ChatGPT's current writing skills – and what recent developments around artificial intelligence might mean for human creativity. I think the story is an elegant emptiness. I'm more interested by Winterson's suggestion that we treat AI as "alternative intelligence". That makes it feel like a consciousness with which we can have a relationship, but as far as I know that would be like a bird falling in love with its reflection in a window.

Ever since Garry Kasparov lost his second chess match against IBM's Deep Blue in 1997, the writing has been on the wall for humanity. Or so some like to think. Advances in artificial intelligence will lead – by some estimates, in only a few decades – to the development of superintelligent, sentient machines. Movies from The Terminator to The Matrix have portrayed this prospect as rather undesirable. But is this anything more than yet another sci-fi "Project Fear"?

There is a lot more than the usual amount of handwringing over AI these days. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former US Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger put out a new book last week warning of AI's dangers. Fresh AI warnings have also been issued by professors Stuart Russell (UC Berkeley) and Youval Harari (University of Jerusalem). Op-eds from the editorial board at the Guardian and Maureen Dowd at the New York Times have amplified these concerns. Facebook -- now rebranded as Meta -- has come under growing pressure for its algorithms creating social toxicity, but it is hardly alone.

Author Jeanette Winterson has been reading and writing about artificial intelligence and its relationship to humans for years. But, as she says in the introduction to her new book, she felt like she wasn't seeing the big picture of how technology is subtly changing human relationships. Her book, a collection of essays called "12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next," explores these themes. Winterson goes back to the first computers of the Industrial Revolution and imagines how AI will shape our love and sex lives in the future.

"It was uproar," she says, "We saw cars on fire." Her flat is in the East End district of Spitalfields in a Georgian house, which she bought 25 years ago, complete with a little shop that she ran for years as an organic grocer and tea room until the rates got too high, and she let it out to an upmarket chocolatier. It's as if a scene from Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop has been dropped into a satire about prosperity Britain: the quaint old shopfront is still intact, while outside it a lifesize sculpture of a rowing boat full of people sits surreally in the middle of the street, and a little further along, a herd of large bronze elephants frolics. These public artworks only arrived a few weeks ago, Winterson explains, as part of a grand plan to pedestrianise the area, and make it more buzzy, just at the moment that the sort of well-heeled office workers who bought upmarket chocolates are abandoning it owing to the Covid pandemic. We're at a transitional moment in so many ways, she says – a perfect moment to launch a book that reassesses the past while staring the future in the face.

In Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein, a scientist creates life and is horrified by what he has done. Two centuries on, synthetic life, albeit in a far simpler form, has been created in a dish. What Shelley imagined has only now become possible. But as Jeanette Winterson points out in this essay collection, the achievements of science and technology always start out as fiction. Not everything that can be imagined can be realised, but nothing can be realised if it hasn't been imagined first.

Each new year brings a frisson of excitement among book lovers as they anticipate the happy hours ahead absorbed in a library's worth of fresh reads. And 2019 looks to be bumper year. To whet your appetite we've picked a selection of fiction titles from a range of established and new authors. The list is by no means exhaustive. It may not even end up tempting you.