Spectator competition winners: first and last lines of novels seen in a new light

In Competition No. 3284, you were invited to supply a topical short story that begins with the last line of a well-known novel and ends with the first.

Much has been written about the rise of AI bot ChatGPT (from zero users to several million its first two weeks!), and reader Alistair Kelman fed it the last and first lines of Nineteen Eighty-Four to see how it would fare with this challenge. There’s no room to share the result, alas, but I can say that while it won’t be winning any prizes for now, the bot’s performance was a marked improvement on that of a predecessor, GPT-2, set the same task a few years ago. So watch this space.

Brian Murdoch described this as ‘an interestingly difficult assignment’ which was evidently a good thing judging by the mammoth entry. The best five earn £30, and commiserations go to worthy runners-up Gopali Mulji, Susan McReynolds, Chris Ramsey, David Taylor, Sue Pickard, J.C.H.