Hello, I'm Alexi. On the main show, we cover one story a week, and there's always more to think about.

So we're trying something new, a conversation about something else we've been thinking about.

And this week, I've been obsessing over a story in the New York Times that raises all sorts of questions about AI and literature and what makes good art.

So, the story asks readers to compare five pairs of writing samples.

One is written by AI and the other by a well-known author,

and then choose which ones you prefer.

I read a few novels and I write about AI, so I thought I'd ace this test,

and I got 50%.

I might as well have flipped a coin.

And what I found shocking and also annoying is that I didn't manage to identify a passage from Cormac McCarthy,

who was one of my favorite authors.

I chose the passage from AI. What does that mean? That's the question today, or one of them,

given the pace of the AI change, could in a few years an AI write a book a prize-winning novel?

Or will that never happen? Are such fears overblown?

To discuss this, I'm joined by wonderful observer colleagues, Tom Gatti, the Observer's book editor,

Erica Wagner, a writer and literary critic, and a two-time's former Booker Prize judge.

We are also joined by Ada Barume, a producer here and an author herself.

Hi, Alexie. Hello, Ada. And you have very kindly agreed to be our AI test guinea pig.

Yes, that's right. So I did this test of my own writing a couple of weeks ago where I gave the, I gave ChatGBTGBT

BT the same prompt as I was given by my editor to write my book and I asked it to write the first

page. So when this sort of New York Times game appeared where I had to guess other people's

writing, I thought it might be fun to have a go because obviously when it's my writing, I thought that it was far better than chat GPT, but maybe that's bias speaking. Okay, so let's do the first. The first question, I'll read out one passage and you read out the other. Okay, so it's a literary fiction. Choose the passage you like the best, regardless of how it may be written. Okay, I'll go first.

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