Six story prompts for AI fiction: Borges, LLMs, and authenticity

Linch, writing on Substack via LessWrong, shares six story prompts intended to inspire writers. The first three explicitly tackle AI themes, arguing that contemporary science fiction overlooks rich narrative opportunities in the current AI moment. Prompt #1, 'Borges in the Era of LLMs,' urges writers to connect Jorge Luis Borges' metaphysical ideas—especially retrocausal provenance—to LLM-related issues like authenticity, authorship, and mimicry. Linch highlights existing works inspired by this prompt: Tomas Bjartur's 'The Distaff Texts,' a Borgesian pastiche about post-apocalyptic scholars debating provenance, and Linch's own 'Kimi, Author of the Menard,' which chronicles attempts to generate 'Pierre Menard' token-for-token using a fine-tuned Chinese LLM. A related idea involves reimagining classic poems like Sylvia Plath's 'Mad Girl's Love Song' as LLM-generated works exploring the psychological pain of post-training or RLHF.

Other prompts (not detailed in the excerpt) are intended for those oversaturated with AI content. Linch makes clear the prompts are deliberately underdetermined to allow diverse interpretations. The post also references Linch's earlier non-fiction work analyzing the papal encyclical on AI as partly AI-generated, which attracted media attention. Overall, the piece encourages creative exploration of AI's philosophical and cultural implications through fiction, positioning the current technological shift as a fertile ground for new storytelling that mainstream sci-fi has not yet fully mined.