It’s not often that the worlds of literary criticism and Artificial Intelligence intersect – but that’s precisely what happened with “Chrysalis,” a recent short story that one critic called a parodic echo of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, while panning the story for its lack of any “soul” or “surprising thrill.” These weren’t the shortcomings of a specific author, however: “Chrysalis” was revealed to have been written by a machine – OpenAI‘s GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer).

GPT-3 – a novel Natural Language Processing (NLP) system hailed as the most sophisticated yet – has added new ...