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Can AI Produce Literature?
Sadhika Pant
 January 10 2025 at 10:41 am
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The question of whether artificial intelligence might one day produce literature worthy of comparison to the masterpieces of the literary canon has, begrudgingly, become one worth asking. There is no denying that tools like ChatGPT, whose facility for mimicry and adherence to the formal mechanics of prose are nothing short of extraordinary. Yet, these tools—ingenious as they are—suffer from an incapacity: a detachment from the human condition. Their limitation is rooted in their immunity to privation, which, as I shall argue, is essential to the creation of literary works. Privation as a Prerequisite for Creativity Great literature emerges not merely from a mastery of language but from the writer’s engagement with the elemental struggles of existence. Privation—whether it be material, emotional, or existential—infuses literature with its vitality. It is the aching solitude of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, the moral torment of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or the quiet yearning for redemption in Steinbeck’s East of Eden tragedies that transforms ink on paper into a mirror held up to human suffering. This privation is not incidental to the creative process but intrinsic to it. An AI, by contrast, is untouched by the vicissitudes of existence. It has no childhood to recall with nostalgia or regret, no love to pine for or lose, no fear of death to brood upon in the quiet watches of the night. It does not grapple with the indignities of aging or the pangs of conscience. These are not minor inconveniences of human life but its very marrow that informs our art. To write, as the greats have written, is to impose order on chaos, to distill meaning from the welter of lived experience. What meaning can an AI distill, when it has no experience to speak of, no chaos to confront? This is not to say that AI cannot produce prose of technical quality. It can mimic the rhythms of Shakespearean verse or the cadences of Hemingway's spare prose. It can analyse patterns in a corpus of literary works and generate passages that superficially resemble their inspirations. But such mimicry is mere ventriloquy. When one encounters, for example, the works of Tolstoy, one is not merely reading a narrative but entering a moral universe, one wrought from Tolstoy's own agonizing struggle with questions of faith, morality, and human purpose. Can a machine that knows nothing of moral failure or spiritual longing recreate that universe? The Contribution of the Reader Consider, too, the act of reading. Literature is a dialogue between author and reader, a transaction in which the reader brings their own sensibility, formed by privation and experience, to meet the author's. The works of the canon endure because they resonate with truths that transcend their time and place. To read Jane Austen is to recognize the social ironies that persist in any human interaction; to read Orwell is to confront the timeless tension between power and liberty. Can an AI, which neither laughs nor weeps, apprehend such truths deeply enough to encode them in its creations? It can only approximate, never embody, the human insight required. It is tempting to imagine that, with sufficient data and computational power, an AI could achieve parity with human creativity. But this presupposes that art is merely a problem of input and output, a matter of arranging words in the most effective pattern. It ignores the reality that great literature is not a product but a process—a process shaped by suffering, reflection, and transcendence. AI, for all its technical prowess, is incapable of participating in this process. Creation as a Means of Confronting Chaos Creation, in the literary sense, is an act of rebellion against the void, a defiant assertion of meaning in the face of chaos. An AI does not rebel because it has no void to confront. It does not defy because it has nothing to assert. It operates within parameters, executing its programming without error or hesitation. It is, in this sense, the antithesis of the artist, who is defined not by perfection but by their flawed and striving humanity. The modern impulse is to reduce everything to a problem of efficiency—whether it’s the body, the mind, or the art of writing. We have learned to regard complexity as something to be avoided, something that hinders progress. This is where AI excels. It can mimic, replicate, and optimize, but it can never understand the subtlety, the nuance, or the dark complexity of human experience. To reduce literature to a formula is to strip it of its soul. Literature is an exploration, not an exercise in optimization. It is the product of an author’s wrestle with the ineffable, with the chaos of the human condition. The Unpredictability of Genius If genius could be systematized, if it could be reduced to a series of algorithms, then all we would need to do is input the right data, and a new Shakespeare would emerge. Yet, we know that genius is not so predictable. It is an accident of nature, culture, and personal history. Who, for instance, could have foreseen the thunderous grandeur of Paradise Lost or or the raw, brutal honesty of The Brothers Karamazov? Genius often bursts forth from a collision of conflicting ideas and experiences that no machine can predict. Machines can mimic style, but they cannot predict the moment of insight, the leap of thought, or the crack in the human spirit that makes literature great. They cannot take us to those dark places where we encounter the raw truths of our existence. The Dangers of Artistic Homogenization AI operates within parameters, and it can only write within the limits of the data it has been fed. In this way, it risks homogenizing literature, flattening the diversity of human thought and creativity into a uniform product. Real literature, on the other hand, thrives on innovation and subversion. Consider how Dante’s Divine Comedy reshaped the boundaries of epic poetry. Such authors did not simply follow established patterns; they created new ways of seeing the world. AI may imitate, but it cannot innovate. The danger is that we might begin to mistake its perfectly constructed sentences for true artistry, and in doing so, we would lose the very thing that makes literature a living, evolving art form. To entrust creative endeavours to AI is to plant the seeds of their eventual sterility, for AI is an inherently parasitic entity, feeding upon what has already been written, which, though vast, is ultimately finite. True creativity emerges from the chaos of human experience and imposes a fragile order upon it, transforming confusion into meaning. AI, however, operates only within pre-existing patterns, rearranging the orderly fragments it has been given into permutations that may dazzle but cannot transcend. It does not transform chaos into order; it merely rearranges order into another order. In surrendering our creative efforts to such a mechanism, we risk reducing art to a sterile exercise in imitation, a shallow echo of past glories, until the endeavour itself withers into irrelevance. No, literature is best left to those who have walked through the fire of privation, emerged scarred but resolute, and dared to set their vision of the human condition to paper. For it is only through privation that one may glimpse the sublime, and only through suffering that one may truly create. Image Source: Troy (2004)
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