It turns out we actually needed AI to realise we’re writing badly

Death to AI, long live AI. The facts: Mantua Literature Festival, 30th edition. The city where, every September, thousands of readers meet the writers they love. A magnificent setting and a magnificent scene: you stroll along the Gonzaga lakeside promenade, cross the San Giorgio bridge, with the Mincio to your right and to your left, and on the horizon the city appears just like that, like a cake on a platter. For five days, the joyful illusion of a human place.

But this year, among the writers, almost everywhere—beneath the arcades of the refreshment area, in the trattorias, among the outdoor seating areas of the bars—a single spectre was lurking, or rather, running about. That of artificial intelligence. It even swallowed up the gossip, which was never as scarce as this year, nor as feeble. The talk was solely of intelligence that creates monsters, of monsters that will take away humanity’s jobs, of humanity now on the path to cognitive atrophy. The results of a study published by Cambridge University Press this summer were still fresh: it stated that a large sample of readers had preferred stories generated by AI to those written by flesh-and-blood authors. And then there were the warnings about mass extinction caused by a ‘psycho-werewolf’ algorithm, which reverberated beneath the round-arched triple windows of the Bonacolsi building.

Attendees took sides. Some expressed moderate scepticism, others thundered with total scepticism, whilst others were shouting into a megaphone whilst perched on a fifth-floor windowsill (also known as the Coxon level). Some sipped Camparino and declared, ‘we’ll become extinct’, others remarked, ‘better sooner than later’ while ordering a second round of mini pizzas, and still others muttered, ‘I’m sending out my CVs’ as they helped the waiter clear the table, suddenly sympathetic to the cause of wage earners. Others intoned, rolling a cigarette, ‘We’re facing such a paradigm shift here that…’ and predicted the Apocalypse; still others sighed, spearing an olive, ‘I was right not to have children’; those who ordered their third glass of Franciacorta and snorted, “Oh, sure, let her write all the books herself – it’s a right pain in the neck, after all.”

The question was: will AI really write everything? Will it write better than us? Will literature no longer make sense? A lifetime spent straining our eyes over the classics, talking about books at festivals, universities and book clubs, boring our children to death with the humanities – from Geronimo Stilton to comic-book versions of Don Quixote – and now we’re just going to wipe it all out like that, with a stroke of software?

One participant recounted a series of disturbing experiments. “I asked her: ‘Write me a story in my style,’ and she wrote a story as if I’d written it myself – it’s enough to make you want to shoot yourself.” Another put it into perspective: “I did it too, but she handed me a story that seemed like a parody of my own. Horrible, anyway.” A third said: “I don’t do these experiments, or they turn out badly for me.”

He then remarks: “I know of colleagues who are rewriting a novel they’d already submitted because, after studying the AI’s writing style a bit, they’ve decided to strip it of all those elements that seemed to have been generated by AI, so as not to run the risk of being accused of having written it with AI”.

It is a striking realisation that AI might be necessary to bring us back to the fundamentals. It appears that AI was required for us to recognise that we have been writing poorly—indeed, very poorly—contrary to our own interests, independently of our trivial concerns. Perhaps we needed AI to rediscover the need to have a relationship with words, with stories, with the deeper meaning of writing – which isn’t simply about stringing sentences together.

It states: but there’s no contest; people will always prefer a simpler, more predictable text (these are the explanations provided by the sample group of readers that emerge from the study published by Cambridge University Press). That will certainly be the case. Tomorrow, just as today and yesterday. So, nihil novi sub soli.

For the writer, rewriting an entire novel simply because, since the advent of AI, one does not want to be accused of having used AI, is like behaving well so as not to be accused of having behaved badly. Artificial virtue, one might say – but that has never been a problem.