It's a nice touch that the author defends humans, but just like the ones telling that playing Go is too complicated for machines to be learned, I'm pretty convinced that the author is ultimately wrong.

I think we need a new approach however. Most of the ML/AI efforts have been directed into the direction of replicating convinving speech at the word and sentence level. I don't think it's possible to reach the goal of novel writing at any stage of extension of this research — simply because that's also not how humans write novels.

I think what's missing for GPT-3 et al. (as well as for the models in music that I'm closely following) to reach this point is a new kind of adversarial approach that supplements the current bottom-up methods with a top-down mindset.

What we're still missing is the front lobe of deep nets that directs any kind of underlying "high level" syntactic network into the stories and narratives it wants to reach, while supervising setting, pace and form along the way.

Once we found that very breakthrough, humanity is toast from there. Just my 2 cents.