‘An Experiment in Lust, Regret, and Kissing’

Novelist Curtis Sittenfeld collaborated with The New York Times to conduct a literary experiment comparing the storytelling abilities of humans and artificial intelligence. The experiment involved a contest between Sittenfeld and ChatGPT, a popular AI tool, to write a beach read story. The goal was to understand AI's capabilities and potential threats to human writers. Sittenfeld and ChatGPT each wrote a story, and readers were invited to judge which one was better. Sittenfeld's story was preferred by the author, although she was not entirely certain which story was which. The experiment aimed to explore the characteristics of a beach read and the capabilities of AI in storytelling.