‘AI will be the end of us’ – is Colm Tóibín right about the threat to creative writing?
In 1950, William Faulkner delivered a famous acceptance speech for the Nobel prize in literature in which he rallied for the “inexhaustible [human] voice” and his belief in its supremacy – not merely to endure but to prevail. Faulkner reasoned this was because the human voice, transmuted into art, possesses soul – a soul capable of compassion and sacrifice.
Fast forward 75 years. Irish writer Colm Tóibín is asked about AI’s impact on writers in a newspaper interview. His wry response: “AI will be the end of us.”
Tóibín seems to believe that the triumphant human voice, one which writers and artists often cling to, will neither endure nor prevail. At least, not over the disruptive, transformative technology of Generative AI. He continued:
This idea [that] no machine could ever replace my sensibility, which is so rich, varied, complex, and arising from experience and from history – that’s all rubbish. You can actually manufacture that. And the more material they put into the machines, the more the machines will just learn about what sentences sound like, what rhythm is like. And the novelist can go and do something more useful.
Equally pertinent and pessimistic are the final pages of the late Cormac McCarthy’s penultimate novel, The Passenger. The great American writer had spent the last decades of his life studying complex adaptive systems at the Santa Fe Institute, writing: “In the end, there will be nothing that cannot be simulated. And this will be the final abridgement of privilege. This is the world to come. Not some other.”
Art versus algorithm
What to do with such doomsaying? What can novelists and creative writing students say in our paltry human voices that won’t simply be co-opted for training data?
Well, it’s worth noting some hard truths first. Generative AI and proprietary large language models (LLMs) are not neutral tools to be either ethically harnessed or maliciously abused. They are predictive matrices, data harvesters and plagiarism remixers, designed to collate and privatise human knowledge and activity to maximise corporate interests over social needs.
We should consider both the ideological and environmental implications for AI. As institutions default to these technologies, AI becomes a shiny symbol that accelerates the drive to value creative writing only as a measurable professional output. AI adoption may signal competitive productivity, efficiency and innovation, while actually deskilling and disempowering the majority of creative writers.
This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.
AI’s vast computational infrastructure requires ever more data centres, processing units, cloud networks, water consumption, and rare earth element mining and export. This is so planet-wrecking in its resource intensity, it is already probably irreconcilable with present climate goals.
Nevertheless, “the world to come” is already here. AI is swiftly becoming our status quo. As a creative writer’s tool, it can serve as a shortcut, eliminating the need to take the traditional toilful journey of conflicting desire in which the writer writes to both better understand and be better understood.
There might now be little effort or intentionality for the writer beyond inputting a prompt. That misses the point of what authors do and why. Perhaps AI-free creative writing composition will become an artisan commodity. The publisher Faber has already placed “Human Written” stamps on the cover of author Sarah Hall’s latest novel.
But AI will continue to affect writers, existentially and economically, as it disrupts the creative industries and beyond. Last year, novelist and GenAI researcher Clementine Collett published her sobering author and publisher survey, in which respondents reported increasing anxiety, grievance and loss of income.
There is small comfort in the fact that, as long as there are people around, there will always be some human and market interest in beautiful and provocative things that have been created solely by other people.
We can care more deeply about a thing because of what we feel we know of its creator, and what they might have endured and sacrificed to create it. Often this is what imbues art with its real meaning and value. How can it be truly meaningful or valuable if its creation has not cost its creator something?
Our desire for and engagement with any creative work is often at an uncanny remove from the thing itself. It is partially rooted in the relational – all the surrounding elements that influence how we encounter and interpret the creative work. This framing constructs a story around it that can also manipulate our desires.
What a shame that capitalism knows this. For this is not just how it eternally sells us stuff, it is now how its technology gets us to concede its claim on our endeavours – stealing, recomposing and hallucinating them for our convenience. And while AI is unlikely to exhaust what Faulkner called the “inexhaustible [human] voice”, it may drown it out under its own artificial echo.
Let’s say Tóibín and McCarthy are right: all our past and future creative labour will be stolen, simulated and commodified without friction. Nonetheless, creative writing, outside of markets and databanks, remains a stubbornly human essential.
As a successful species of emotional primates hardwired for both aggression and collaboration, we still seek to relate, exchange and communicate honestly with ourselves through the creative struggle. Personal artistic creation and its reception by others can alter our moral trajectories, expand consciousness, challenge, comfort and disturb. This is partly because writing is an act, not just a product.
As Faulkner suggested in his Nobel speech, it is the creative act of writing which demonstrates “the human heart in conflict with itself”. This is why it is dangerous. This is why trillions of dollars will soon be invested in making readers and writers forget this. It’s critical that we don’t forget.
Tom Benn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.