The Battle for Fiction: Robots vs. Writers

Naza Iwe, BA History and World Philosophies, 03/02/2025

There is no place for artificial intelligence in the world of fiction. A writer’s entire purpose is to write; they are creators, crafters, and masters. They produce art by putting pen to paper and there simply isn’t space for AI. 

Authors are artists, we are consumers, and to some extent, we should be curious to know and connect with them. The voices of our 21^st century greats are loud and we should listen to them. R.F. Kuang, Brandon Sanderson, V.E. Schwab and, controversially, Sally Rooney are all recognisable out of context. Any lover of their genres would know them. They can, and should be heard; AI would diminish their voices. The controversy of Rooney’s writing in her stylistic lack of punctuation, Kuang’s refusal to write romance into her work, Sanderson’s winding and connecting universes, and Schwab’s insistence to simply write stories that she wants to read could never be replicated by AI.

AI is destructive to fiction authors’ livelihoods. The class action lawsuit brought forward by The Author’s Guild and 17 named authors supports this. The authors in question sued OpenAI in the Southern District of New York for copyright infringement, or more bluntly put, theft. The Authors Guild went as far as to call ChatGPT’s use of published works ‘identity theft on a grand scale,’ as it is. Writers pour themselves into their work, they pull characters, worlds, and stories from the unknown and offer them to the world. We should respect them enough to not bastardise their work. Using AI to write is lazy and accepting AI-generated work is worse. It ruins us as people; if sentences poorly strung together with no human voice are entertainment, then why should anyone write at all?

Fiction has always been more than just a story. It’s a form of transportation and a teacher. Rooney’s work draws us out of our own minds and into those of complex and unreliable women with Frances and Marianne. We take a break from our woes and share in theirs, hopefully learning to face our own challenges with a new perspective. The depth of a woman, or of any person, cannot be copied artificiality. AI can't build worlds the way Kuang does, weaving politics and power into magic, desire and loss. It can't build systems of magic, make us weep or question our fundamentals of self. AI doesn’t feel nor can it learn to feel. AI can copy, it can learn and emulate but it can’t build, can’t master and most importantly, AI cannot craft. AI is soulless, and a world with no soul is desolate.  

Even if you accept that AI cannot write a whole book because it cannot feel, there still isn’t room for it in the world of fiction, not even in the planning or outlining. V.E. Schwab’s interview podcast No Write Way is a series of love letters to the craft: sharing parts of yourself, the chaos or order of outlining, learning who the characters are as people, giving them depth, and the building of systems of power. Fiction is a reflection of reality and we must preserve it as such. In this way, Schwab’s podcast has become a safe haven for writers. To remind them that their work is difficult, and that we, as readers and consumers, must respect the effort it takes to create. Fitting AI into these spaces is, at best, a disservice to writers and, in its current state, the worst kind of theft.