Pron vs Prompt: Can Large Language Models already Challenge a World-Class Fiction Author at Creative Text Writing?

Are LLMs ready to compete in creative writing skills with a top (rather than average) novelist? To provide an initial answer for this question, we have carried out a contest between Patricio Pron (an awarded novelist, considered one of the best of his generation) and GPT-4 (one of the top performing LLMs), in the spirit of AI-human duels such as DeepBlue vs Kasparov and AlphaGo vs Lee Sidol. We asked Pron and GPT-4 to provide thirty titles each, and then to write short stories for both their titles and their opponent’s. Then, we prepared an evaluation rubric inspired by Boden’s definition of creativity, and we collected several detailed expert assessments of the texts, provided by literature critics and scholars. The results of our experimentation indicate that LLMs are still far from challenging a top human creative writer. We also observed that GPT-4 writes more creatively using Pron’s titles than its own titles (which is an indication of the potential for human-machine co-creation). Additionally, we found that GPT-4 has a more creative writing style in English than in Spanish.