Following a recent case of plagiarism of an article in the Catalan sphere, which the forger attributed to a mishap caused by AI, and a rather important Anglo-Saxon literary prize, which an author allegedly won also using AI, there has been renewed discussion in the world of literary creativity about what we will do from now on with texts that wish to circulate in the world, the authorship of which may be questioned by virtue of their possible algorithmic origin. For someone to use AI to write a literary piece can only be due to reasons related to their shortcomings as an intellectual or as a writer. For a true author, using AI to write would be like using skates to play football, when precisely the grace of the game is running. For me, having the machine write for me is equivalent to having a machine make love for me, or sending a robot to bed with the lover, simply because I'm lazy or I fear that this way I will look better in front of my beloved. It makes no sense to entrust a machine to do what gives us pleasure and lucidity, what makes us feel alive and intelligent. Furthermore, I doubt that any machine can currently write with the accuracy that good writers continue to have, but even if that point were reached in the near future, what the bot might tell us would also be of no interest, since it is literally no one and what ends up being interesting about literature and journalism is what a flesh-and-blood person thinks—or feels or sees—about it. A machine cannot tell me what I think about things, because it does not know. Thanks to AI, we might end up simulating an erudition that we do not have, or pretending to have read books we have not actually read, but that would not be a new imposture either. Cheaters are older than the printing press in this trade, and it was precisely the printing press that democratized writing and knowledge. AI is nothing more than a kind of automatic printing press, which produces text at the consumer's whim, which is not what writers end up doing; the role of intellectuals is precisely to remind us of what we do not want to remember, or to make us think about things that can give us a headache. When I see an AI questioning the fundamental ideas of the tribe, I will begin to get scared, but for the moment it is only the voice of the master, because we should not forget that all AI is nothing more than a form of business for those who give it a push. “We were clever enough to invent AI, and foolish enough to need it, and stupid enough that we can't figure out if we did the right thing…”; this was said by none other than the comedian Jerry Seinfeld in a recent interview. And we can think about whether he's right or not without AI. I, for one, still prefer to keep reading people who make mistakes, who doubt, who obsess, and even who self-destruct while writing, rather than a machine that simply calculates which sentence fits best with the preceding ones. Literature is not just text production: it is vanity, it is contradiction, it is a human consciousness trying to understand itself. And this, for better or for worse, cannot yet be automated.
