Can AI Write Literature? (11)
The big question …
By Derek B. Miller | AI and Literature
Every few generations, the questions change. Or seem to. They come dressed in new language, wearing the fashion of the moment, buzzing with novelty. But often enough, the deeper question is older than we think—something perennial, hidden under the folds.
Right now, the question being asked—sometimes in jest, sometimes in panic, and sometimes in quiet, urgent tones—is this:
Can artificial intelligence write literature?
I’m writing a novel at the moment—No One Dies in Norwood—and in it there’s a 22-year-old woman named Lenore Hutchinson. She’s from a small town in Maine. Her father runs a funeral home. Her mother died recently, and Lenore, who had been studying English at a small liberal arts college, dropped out and returned home. She’s smart, a little sardonic, and she knows what matters—though she wouldn’t put it like that. She’s trying to live in the wreckage of things, like a lot of people these days.
In one of her literature courses before she left, this very question was posed: Can AI write literature?
And what struck me, as I followed her into that conversation—not as her creator but as her student—was how much this question meant to her. It wasn’t hypothetical. It wasn’t technological. It wasn’t abstract. It was existential. She and her classmates didn’t approach the question as a theoretical exercise in authorship. They approached it the way young people often do when the world still feels malleable: passionately, hungrily, and with the belief that the answer matters to their lives.
I found that I couldn’t answer the question for her until I listened to how she and her peers were thinking about it. And more importantly, how they were feeling about it.
That became the frame for this post. Not just the question Can AI write literature?, but What do we mean when we ask it? And what kind of world are we building by how we answer it?
The Case for AI Literature
AI can already write. It can produce novels, poems, scripts, and essays. It can mimic Hemingway, channel Austen, or parody Proust. It can respond to prompts with a strong command of language, pacing, and structure. Some short stories generated with the help of AI have even won contests under pseudonyms.
Some, like Stephen Marche, argue that we are shifting from a “writer’s economy” to a “prompt economy,” where the creative work lies in engineering the right instructions, not the final product. Others, such as Ted Chiang, describe language models as forms of “lossy compression”—tools that remix and compress vast bodies of human language without understanding their meaning.
These two views reflect the current tension: Is AI an emerging co-author of human expression—or simply a mirror, reflecting what we already are?
But neither position fully addresses the deeper issue Lenore was wrestling with. Because both frame the question in terms of output. Both are asking, essentially, “Can it produce something that passes for literature?”
Lenore’s question was different.
If art teaches us how to live, then who—or what—do we want teaching us?
Literature as a Unique Technology for Living
Literature teaches us how to live. Not how to succeed. Not how to win. Not how to conform. But how to live: with longing, with regret, with ecstasy, with absurdity. It is an emotional, intellectual, and existential apprenticeship. It renders not only values but experience—what it feels like to be alive from the inside out.
This function is not new.
In ancient Greece, theater was not primarily entertainment. It was ritual, revelation, reckoning. The tragedians—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—were not showmen. They were civic witnesses, plumbing the mysteries of suffering, fate, justice, and mercy in front of the polis. The Greeks did not go to the theater to forget the world. They went to remember it more clearly.
Aristotle called this catharsis—an emotional purification through pity and fear. But the function went beyond mere emotion. Tragedy gave structure to chaos. It taught the audience not just what happens, but how the self ought to respond—how to endure, how to choose, how to reconcile oneself with consequences. It was emotional logic rendered in mythic form.
In the modern world, literature carries forward that mantle.
While theater still exists—and television and film have taken its place in the popular imagination—literature remains uniquely suited to the task of interiority. It alone among the storytelling arts gives us full access to the internal life of another. Novels are the only art form in which a character’s thoughts, reflections, contradictions, rationalizations, justifications, and self-deceptions can be expressed in slow motion, with recursive depth and fine-grained attention.
No other form can do this—not with the same fidelity, not with the same philosophical intimacy.
Film externalizes. Theater dramatizes. Television serializes.
But literature interiorizes. It traces the landscape of thought and soul. It shows how convictions are formed, how desires distort perception, how grief reshapes time. Literature can hold competing truths in the same paragraph, or shift point of view mid-sentence, not to disorient, but to show that disorientation is part of the truth of being alive.
That is not a competitive advantage. It is a categorical difference. It is a unique technology.
Literature stands on a different mountain. It is not vying for supremacy with other arts. It simply shows us things no other medium can. And from that distinct perch, it offers a valuable and irreplaceable view.
Not Just What AI Can Write—But What We’ll Accept
This is where Lenore brought me.
Because the question of whether AI can write literature is not ultimately a technological one. It is a civilizational one.
The more urgent issue isn’t what AI is capable of producing—it’s what we are willing to accept as sufficient.
We already live in a time when we tolerate, even prefer, the efficient over the meaningful. We choose speed over care, scale over depth. We fill the void with content and call it connection. And if we allow ourselves to believe that literature is just another form of content—if we flatten it into style and cleverness and novelty—then yes, AI will absolutely do the job.
But if we still believe that literature is where we go to learn how to live—then we must insist that the source matters.
We don’t take advice about courage from those who’ve never been afraid. We don’t ask a chatbot how to grieve. And we don’t give the last word on what it means to be human to something that was never asked to be one.
The Answer Is Already Inside the Question
Lenore asked the question because it mattered to her. And I came to my answer by following the trail of her emotions—and listening to which ones rang with the clarity of something timeless.
So: Can AI write literature?
It can produce something that looks like literature. Something that may read like it. That may, in some ways, even move us. But literature is not simply a sequence of beautiful sentences. It is a long conversation about how to live, conducted across generations by those who have dared to do so.
So the answer, finally, is not about ability.
It is about trust.
And in the end, I believe we do not want to learn how to live by the words of something that never lived
at all.
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This is some brilliant analysis and speaks to why reading a book is always a revelation. Interiorization! What a concept. Even autocorrect doesn’t know it.