Will AI Preside Over the End of Literature?

The award of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize to an AI-generated short story, published in the elite Granta magazine this May, proves that as far as winning a prize for a single work is concerned, nothing is better suited than an LLM. Fed on the right cues (and prize-winning entries over a decade?) AI can assimilate every bias, preference, weaknesses of a jury and spit out something humming with all the tropes literary juries are likely to fall for.

Those who approve of AI-generated creative work ask: How does it matter that AI was used to write or generate a work as long as the quality of a story is judged to be 'literary'? AI critics who (still) believe in the supremacy of human thought and creativity ask: Was the jury tone deaf? How could Commonwealth jury judge AI slop as literature? Wringing hands at the regurgitated slop reigning on submission portals, they question the discernment of literary gatekeepers and predict the end of Literature.

I understand that these fulminations are necessary because the coming decades will call into question our understanding of human consciousness itself. What is the essence of our humanness, if not the ability to think, feel and tell stories? Using language to weave thoughts and feelings in an imaginative way in order to tell stories is a uniquely human trait. We need stories, songs and fables to embody our lived reality and to express what cannot be expressed with precision and acuity through direct communication.

We tell stories and spout couplets and songs and listen to them because they capture the subjectivity and paradoxes of human experience in an entertaining, illuminating, memorable way. Without this ability, we would be like the rest of the animal world, our subjectivity so locked that only the ‘group-self’ exists.

AI proposes itself as a technology which will enable everyone to share experience by dispensing with language. But what it is actually proposing is to produce more ‘creative’-sounding output by thinking and feeling less. Outcome and efficiency get prioritised over the process and struggle of writing fiction. As a creative writer, let me tell you, if not for delight in the never-ending process, none of us would be writing. Here’s Ghalib describing the delight the process brings.

Aaatey hain ghaib sey ye mazameen khayal mein

Ghalib sareer-e-khama, nawa-e-sarosh hai

(These verses come to me from a world invisible;

Ghalib, the scratching of my pen is the song of a heavenly messenger)

Can truth emerge from LLM-fuelled mixing and regurgitating? Not being an ‘Expert in AI’ nor a user, I am not the right person to comment on these predictions. I know, however, that the timeless stories are timeless because they spring from the bedrock of some unique subjective experience the writer is obsessed with, which makes her struggle to put it into words. Like the narrator on a never-ending uphill walk in Kafka’s The Castle. His trek, riddled with endless obstacles and detours, captured Kafka’s fatigue and frustration with the bureaucratic life.

One thing is certain: the facility to produce creatively without engagement with imaginative thought will create an illusion of subjectivity without any connection to the subsoil of lived and perceived experience. AI’s seductive fast track will take all the slow burn and long churn out of creative labour. The despair, the deep feeling that comes out of it, the critical thinking, the conscience building. All these can be dispensed with. Writers will have the option to dispense with imaginative and emotional faculties or the need to develop their own creative judgement. AI will be at hand with versions that’ll sound as good as real human experience. Experience plus plus.

Over time, writing by AI slopping will decimate creativity by completely delinking subjectivity from perceived (by human) experience. By unmooring metaphors from the deep feeling which is their wellspring. By lulling people into not exerting their imagination or struggling with hard-won insights. The creative instinct honed on the whetstone of artistic struggle will lose its sheen. And what about a person’s practical understanding of life unaffirmed by great literature? Of what my current favourite read, Julian Barnes, calls “love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. And barn owls”.

Truly, humanity itself will get devalued.

As for literature.

For now, LLMs fed on creative outputs of real human thought can sound poetic, coherent and resonant. But in another decade or two, when AI starts feeding on AI, what hallucinatory hell will it conjure? There will be newer, more sophisticated water-guzzling LLM products with pricing models based on their ability to fetch whatever prizes a writer is angling for. But there will be no writers engaging with the reality of the barren waterless moonscape the planet will become.

Once an LLM wins a Nobel in Literature, the prize-winning LLM model will sell out its limited edition. And a race for bettering it will commence. All else would no longer be in the reckoning. As long as folks can keep winning prizes. Meanwhile, I will indulge my imagination. It’s free, doesn’t guzzle resources and gives me a kick, whether my outputs get published or not.

Varsha Tiwary is a Delhi based writer and translator. She has recently published 1990, Aramganj a translation of the best-selling Hindi novel Rambhakt Rangbaz.

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