no Ai could write like me. I write like I rap, like I rant, like I’m bleeding truth in real ink. My fiction ain’t imititable—it’s a duel with my own ghosts. This essay gets it: the war is here, and real writers better show up.
Many important concepts here. Should be read far and wide- I was accused of using A.I. just once, but it was not a real accusation, it was a dismissal.
This is timely, as I have a book coming out very soon and it is deeply personal, autobiographical. The novelist must accept the challenge and not flinch- I write in the form of a kind of confession, so not hurt by A.I., but I still feel the call to perfect the voice of my work. But then again, I suppose I would feel the call anyway.
White Out and Post-It Notes are the fabric of my universe. Also paperclips, and rubber bands. Envelopes that need saliva to seal. Rubber cement. A chair that doesn’t have rollers.
So much interesting stuff here. Specifically the idea that the author will have to be a persona tied to the artwork, while not a new idea, is quickly becoming an essential idea. In this I think you’re spot on here.
To the point that eventually AI is going to write as good as Joyce I’m a bit more ambivalent. I think it’s in the same vein of needing a human behind the work to give the work meaning. Like when Joyce wrote Ulysses, it came from a place of influence and inspiration - and these influences are a key part of what makes the book work. An LLM might be able to create something that sounds like a new inspiring novelist with a cutting edge approach but will there ever come a time when there’s sufficient intent behind the words? Can a glorified probability model ever reach the point of intent? I don’t know.
And then the real kicker… will enough of us care to about the difference to keep the human novelist in existence? 🤷♀️
> To the point that eventually AI is going to write as good as Joyce I’m a bit more ambivalent. I think it’s in the same vein of needing a human behind the work to give the work meaning.
It sounds like a nitpick, but I said it would write as fluently as Joyce (though in another place I write 'But if a new version of DeepSeek comes out tomorrow that can write as well as ARC'). I probably shouldn't have used the word 'good' in the second sentence bc I'm not sure it's the right one. For some people 'good' just means immersive / a page-turner. But I'm with you in your definition.
> And then the real kicker… will enough of us care to about the difference to keep the human novelist in existence?
This is the real question. My answer is an emphatic yes but it deserves a longer piece to explain why.
Great post. Prior to this I hadn’t thought much about the value of speaking about the experiences that informed someone’s novel. There’s always a certain amount of that but I’d guess authors in the past will have far more latitude for brevity in their responses and discretion in what they share. To your point, it behooves authors to be more ready for questions on inspiration so it eliminates any doubt about a machine’s input.
> To your point, it behooves authors to be more ready for questions on inspiration so it eliminates any doubt about a machine’s input.
Yes, I was thinking about that as I wrote the intro.
For the record, the scenario I mentioned was a real one: My friend, a dentist, called me last week because she was bummed her boyfriend doesn't want to sleep with her that much anymore. That's where "It’s only after six years, once he starts treating sex like a dentist appointment, that he starts laying it on thick" comes from.
I don't think people are going to need to provide proof of inspiration all the time, but being able to explain one's choices is going to be more and more important in the future.
When an AI can write like I can, in my voice, I'm going to shoot myself in the head. I'm a convicted felon, I don't have a pistol. So, I don't anticipate this any time soon.
Actions>words. Actions dont lie. Ask any actor. You cant fake emotions, especially the voice and action. Have to dredge them up from memory, real events in the past.
Im not an actor I judge know a lot of stuff I have no business knowing.
Is the "lying" issue solved if the computer says, "I haven't felt any of the following, but the passage of writing below is a beautiful articulation of a human emotional experience."? It sounds like you've been assuming some sort of deception will be involved, but I think that muddles the conversation. We can all agree that lying is wrong, for humans and machines, but it's more interesting to assume a transparent environment, where there are AI novels published as AI novels, and then ask if they can have value.
In such a transparent environment, if it had been AI who wrote that Henry Miller passage, and we assume the passage never would have existed otherwise... would you rather the passage not exist at all than come from a computer?
> "I haven't felt any of the following, but the passage of writing below is a beautiful articulation of a human emotional experience."
If a computer said that, the following passage would still have no value to me.
> In such a transparent environment, if it had been AI who wrote that Henry Miller passage, and we assume the passage never would have existed otherwise... would you rather the passage not exist at all than come from a computer?
If a computer wrote it, the value to me is zero. I don't care if it exists or not in that case.
"Thus, novelists will need to substantiate the events that formed the basis for their stories..."
This seems a little silly to me. It's fiction. Authors aren't restricted to writing auto-fiction, but you've essentially cherry-picked examples of auto-fiction to make your point, presenting them as if they're representative of all of literature. Writers can pull from across the spectrum of the human experience, not just from their own. (I'm a childless man who writes a lot of pregnant mother characters into my stories, for example. What personal experiences do I present to prove my legitimacy?)
The one passage you selected pertains to novelists who write fiction based on real events. But why are you ignoring this whole other section?
"What about stories that are less strictly autobiographical? When considering this question, the first books that came to mind were Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Trial, and The Great Gatsby. Yet even these tales, though more fantastical, are direct extrapolations of the authors’ experiences... If one goes to the farthest end of imaginative writing, human authors are still preferable to machines. Kafka on the Shore, for example, is entirely untethered from reality, as close to an abstract dream as literature can get. But it is great because Murakami expands on reserves of emotions to turn himself into the characters that were living as fragments inside of him."
Of course people do not need to exclusively write based on their experiences.
Right! Sorry, meant to address that separately. It feels forced to me, to insist that all human writing, no matter how fantastical/speculative/surreal, is a "direct extrapolation of the author's experience." What is Brandon Sanderson's experience that led directly to Mistborn, a novel about people ingesting metals that give them various superpowers? I suppose, for any work of speculative fiction, you could tell a just so story about how some aspect of the author's experience is somehow analogous to or symbolic of the premise. But at a certain point that devolves into absurdity. I think a lot of fantastical work won't fit your schema here.
It also feels just as strange to me to insist that the connection to the author's experience is the thing that gives fantastical work its value in the first place. I've often thought that certain kinds of fantasy make the most sense for incorporating AI, precisely because audience expectations demand less of a direct tether to reality, which frees us to indulge in whatever strange or inventive worlds and scenarios an AI might hallucinate for us, letting our guard down to enjoy the novelty of the experience they provide.
I guess I just want to ask you: if Orwell hadn't had his wartime experience with Stalin's forces, but had written the same 1984 that we know, would you really think less of the novel? And if 1984 had been written by AI, but went on to play the same cultural, historical, and literary role as the great work of dystopian fiction it is... Is its effect really so heavily devalued by its source?
> It feels forced to me, to insist that all human writing, no matter how fantastical/speculative/surreal, is a "direct extrapolation of the author's experience."
In the following passage, when I talk about surreal literature, where do I say anything about it being a direct extrapolation of an author's experience?
"If one goes to the farthest end of imaginative writing, human authors are still preferable to machines. Kafka on the Shore, for example, is entirely untethered from reality, as close to an abstract dream as literature can get. But it is great because Murakami expands on reserves of emotions to turn himself into the characters that were living as fragments inside of him."
It's in the previous paragraph, about 1984, "...Yet even these tales, though more fantastical, are direct extrapolations of the authors’ experiences..."
I assumed you meant your analysis of "fantastical" stories to carry through to your analysis of surreal ones, since those are overlapping, related subgenres. It seemed like you were implying a spectrum of more and less fantastical stories, from Gatsby to 1984 to Kafka on the Shore, so the points from the previous paragraph were still relevant. Please forgive the assumption.
So my follow up question is: do you really want to draw sharp distinctions between sub-genres, so that a book like 1984 gets its value from being a direct extrapolation of the author's experience, while a book like Kafka on the Shore isn't held to the same standard... But is somehow just as valuable?
I broke the novels up into three categories to show that in every case it's best to have a human writing, even if the reasons for why slightly differ.
1984 is a realistic book; thus it benefits from Orwell's real experience. Since he fought in a revolution, he could speak about it and imagine himself in it in a way that other authors (including computers) without that experience would struggle to. It's almost impossible for a guy who has never left his mother's basement to write that "true" a tale, all the way down the tiniest detail (even the rat torture was based off of a real event).
Kafka on the Shore is totally imaginative; thus it doesn't benefit from getting the same sort of details correct (that would be impossible). The reason Murakami's dreams feel believable is because they're true psychologically. He felt all of those emotions, lived as those different characters, and then recorded the experiences. Essentially he's an actor playing different roles. I have no desire to watch a robot actor even if his performance is as good as DDL in "There Will Be Blood." I want to know that a human is feeling and conveying what is inside of himself.
One way to refute the point I'm making is to give examples of novels where it makes no difference if a human or a machine wrote it. Do you have some? If so, why does it not matter if the author was human or not?
Thanks for the clarification! I actually really like the idea that we can categorize stories based on the relationship of the author's experience to the content of the text, that's cool. Sorry I was slow to understand what you were saying there.
As mentioned in my restack, I do think it matters whether a human wrote a given novel (or at least, it's certainly a valid thing to care about), I just don't think it's ALL that matters. You wrote, "...Had a computer written those words, the value to me would be exactly zero." This is a very strong claim. It raises alarm bells in the part of me that's learned to be wary of binaries and all-or-nothing thinking. All I have to do to refute it is point out something about the words in a novel that you agree would be valuable even if a computer had written them. Then I've shown an inconsistency in your beliefs. (Of course, then you can do with that what you will; it's not illegal to hold inconsistent beliefs.)
That's why I asked, in a previous comment in this thread, "...if 1984 had been written by AI, but went on to play the same cultural, historical, and literary role as the great work of dystopian fiction it is... Is its effect really so heavily devalued by its source?" (I have in mind the way it illuminated the insidious nature of authoritarian rule for a general audience, provided a language for future critiques of systems and technology, etc.). Similarly, with regard to the Henry Miller quote you love, I said in my restack that if it had been written by AI, "...at minimum, you now have a perfect and beautiful articulation of one of your most significant experiences. You have this for the rest of your life, and you can share it with others whose experiences are similar, blessing them in turn." Is there any value in this, in your opinion? I would love your thoughts on these two counterfactuals!
More generally, I want to make sure we're not confusing causal facts as evidence for value judgements. What I mean is, it's certainly true that 1984 heavily benefited from Orwell's lived experience. No one can refute that, it's a matter of historical fact. Likewise, it's true that "the reason Murakami's dreams feel believable is because they're true psychologically. He felt all of those emotions..." To the extent that these novels have any value, of course it came about as a direct result of the attributes of the men who actually wrote them.
But these contingent facts about causes offer no support for your judgement that, had they come about by other means (like computer), they would be valueless. Sure, they would lack the value that comes from the specific history we know they have in the real world, but that's baked into the thought experiment; that's just what it means to imagine them having a different origin. Our task, if we're discussing in good faith, is to take the counterfactuals on their own terms, and look hard for the potential value there. (For example, in addition to having similar cultural, historical, and literary effects as the Orwell-written 1984, it might be intrinsically beautiful or fascinating if a man in his basement can distill an AI-written 1984 from the latent patterns of the human language corpus, combining his imagination with the deep research and reasoning capabilities of an LLM to deduce details as granular and believable as required).
I say all that because you challenge me to "give examples of novels where it makes no difference if a human or a machine wrote it." If what you're asking me for is empirical causal-historical examples of actual AI novels as compelling as 1984... Well, AI is still brand new, and I don't think we have any of those yet. So it's an impossible request. That leaves us with counterfactuals, where my task is to suggest value the great novels would have had were they written by AI, and see if that shifts your intuitions at all. Which is kind of what I've been trying to do throughout our exchange, by offering the 1984 counterfactual, expanding your Henry Miller counterfactual a bit in my restack, and even bringing up Sanderson's Mistborn (I think a certain kind of epic fantasy, where the draw is about the puzzle-like intricacies of the magic system, is a good candidate for a genre where a lot of the value is preserved if an AI wrote it.) Anyway, you've tended to avoid engaging with the examples as I've brought them up so far.
> All I have to do to refute it is point out something about the words in a novel that you agree would be valuable even if a computer had written them.
I said "that passage." You could find a sentence from a computer-generated novel that has some value (e.g. description). But the general point still stands: I'm still not going to read passages of emotion if they from a computer.
> it illuminated the insidious nature of authoritarian rule for a general audience, provided a language for future critiques of systems and technology
This is a good point. IMO, the computer's role is to write an essay or make those points thru another medium. It might have been well suited to write something like "Politics & the English Language." But there's so much internal experience in 1984, I have no interest in reading that if it comes from a computer that can't feel.
> with regard to the Henry Miller quote you love
To me it has no value because I don't want a liar to give me a beautiful articulation of something they know nothing about. I want a truth teller to tell me how they really feel and to know that I feel the same. Maybe others feel differently, we'll see in time, I suppose.
So, no, I would not get any value from those books if computers had written them.
no Ai could write like me. I write like I rap, like I rant, like I’m bleeding truth in real ink. My fiction ain’t imititable—it’s a duel with my own ghosts. This essay gets it: the war is here, and real writers better show up.
Right.
Many important concepts here. Should be read far and wide- I was accused of using A.I. just once, but it was not a real accusation, it was a dismissal.
This is timely, as I have a book coming out very soon and it is deeply personal, autobiographical. The novelist must accept the challenge and not flinch- I write in the form of a kind of confession, so not hurt by A.I., but I still feel the call to perfect the voice of my work. But then again, I suppose I would feel the call anyway.
Thanks for this, Anthony.
Thanks!!
I say we destroy all of it and revert to the old days. Pencil, eraser, paper.
Cut out all the bullshit. Never use the internet again.
Love each other.
I remember typewriters and the smell of White Out, and how carbon paper blue never comes out of white faberic. Good times.
White out! What a thing.
White Out and Post-It Notes are the fabric of my universe. Also paperclips, and rubber bands. Envelopes that need saliva to seal. Rubber cement. A chair that doesn’t have rollers.
I really need to upgrade things around here….
Nah, keep it right where it is, friend.
Gives you character.
yes
So much interesting stuff here. Specifically the idea that the author will have to be a persona tied to the artwork, while not a new idea, is quickly becoming an essential idea. In this I think you’re spot on here.
To the point that eventually AI is going to write as good as Joyce I’m a bit more ambivalent. I think it’s in the same vein of needing a human behind the work to give the work meaning. Like when Joyce wrote Ulysses, it came from a place of influence and inspiration - and these influences are a key part of what makes the book work. An LLM might be able to create something that sounds like a new inspiring novelist with a cutting edge approach but will there ever come a time when there’s sufficient intent behind the words? Can a glorified probability model ever reach the point of intent? I don’t know.
And then the real kicker… will enough of us care to about the difference to keep the human novelist in existence? 🤷♀️
> So much interesting stuff here.
Thank you!!
> To the point that eventually AI is going to write as good as Joyce I’m a bit more ambivalent. I think it’s in the same vein of needing a human behind the work to give the work meaning.
It sounds like a nitpick, but I said it would write as fluently as Joyce (though in another place I write 'But if a new version of DeepSeek comes out tomorrow that can write as well as ARC'). I probably shouldn't have used the word 'good' in the second sentence bc I'm not sure it's the right one. For some people 'good' just means immersive / a page-turner. But I'm with you in your definition.
> And then the real kicker… will enough of us care to about the difference to keep the human novelist in existence?
This is the real question. My answer is an emphatic yes but it deserves a longer piece to explain why.
Great post. Prior to this I hadn’t thought much about the value of speaking about the experiences that informed someone’s novel. There’s always a certain amount of that but I’d guess authors in the past will have far more latitude for brevity in their responses and discretion in what they share. To your point, it behooves authors to be more ready for questions on inspiration so it eliminates any doubt about a machine’s input.
> To your point, it behooves authors to be more ready for questions on inspiration so it eliminates any doubt about a machine’s input.
Yes, I was thinking about that as I wrote the intro.
For the record, the scenario I mentioned was a real one: My friend, a dentist, called me last week because she was bummed her boyfriend doesn't want to sleep with her that much anymore. That's where "It’s only after six years, once he starts treating sex like a dentist appointment, that he starts laying it on thick" comes from.
I don't think people are going to need to provide proof of inspiration all the time, but being able to explain one's choices is going to be more and more important in the future.
When we meet up for drinks it will be all too clear I wrote Hell or Hangover 😂
Lol. “I don’t know man, that guy drinks like a fucking machine!”
Hahaha the only I want to be compared to an inanimate object.
When an AI can write like I can, in my voice, I'm going to shoot myself in the head. I'm a convicted felon, I don't have a pistol. So, I don't anticipate this any time soon.
Agreed. AI can write a glowing review of a brunch place, but until it can eat brunch, I'm not interested.
Wonderful piece!
Thank you!
Love this!!
Great article. Humans matter--to other humans.
Thank you!
Actions>words. Actions dont lie. Ask any actor. You cant fake emotions, especially the voice and action. Have to dredge them up from memory, real events in the past.
Im not an actor I judge know a lot of stuff I have no business knowing.
Incisive as always. I second the sentiment. AI is a call for writers to go big or go home.
Thank you! Last comment I promise.
Is the "lying" issue solved if the computer says, "I haven't felt any of the following, but the passage of writing below is a beautiful articulation of a human emotional experience."? It sounds like you've been assuming some sort of deception will be involved, but I think that muddles the conversation. We can all agree that lying is wrong, for humans and machines, but it's more interesting to assume a transparent environment, where there are AI novels published as AI novels, and then ask if they can have value.
In such a transparent environment, if it had been AI who wrote that Henry Miller passage, and we assume the passage never would have existed otherwise... would you rather the passage not exist at all than come from a computer?
> "I haven't felt any of the following, but the passage of writing below is a beautiful articulation of a human emotional experience."
If a computer said that, the following passage would still have no value to me.
> In such a transparent environment, if it had been AI who wrote that Henry Miller passage, and we assume the passage never would have existed otherwise... would you rather the passage not exist at all than come from a computer?
If a computer wrote it, the value to me is zero. I don't care if it exists or not in that case.
"Thus, novelists will need to substantiate the events that formed the basis for their stories..."
This seems a little silly to me. It's fiction. Authors aren't restricted to writing auto-fiction, but you've essentially cherry-picked examples of auto-fiction to make your point, presenting them as if they're representative of all of literature. Writers can pull from across the spectrum of the human experience, not just from their own. (I'm a childless man who writes a lot of pregnant mother characters into my stories, for example. What personal experiences do I present to prove my legitimacy?)
The one passage you selected pertains to novelists who write fiction based on real events. But why are you ignoring this whole other section?
"What about stories that are less strictly autobiographical? When considering this question, the first books that came to mind were Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Trial, and The Great Gatsby. Yet even these tales, though more fantastical, are direct extrapolations of the authors’ experiences... If one goes to the farthest end of imaginative writing, human authors are still preferable to machines. Kafka on the Shore, for example, is entirely untethered from reality, as close to an abstract dream as literature can get. But it is great because Murakami expands on reserves of emotions to turn himself into the characters that were living as fragments inside of him."
Of course people do not need to exclusively write based on their experiences.
Right! Sorry, meant to address that separately. It feels forced to me, to insist that all human writing, no matter how fantastical/speculative/surreal, is a "direct extrapolation of the author's experience." What is Brandon Sanderson's experience that led directly to Mistborn, a novel about people ingesting metals that give them various superpowers? I suppose, for any work of speculative fiction, you could tell a just so story about how some aspect of the author's experience is somehow analogous to or symbolic of the premise. But at a certain point that devolves into absurdity. I think a lot of fantastical work won't fit your schema here.
It also feels just as strange to me to insist that the connection to the author's experience is the thing that gives fantastical work its value in the first place. I've often thought that certain kinds of fantasy make the most sense for incorporating AI, precisely because audience expectations demand less of a direct tether to reality, which frees us to indulge in whatever strange or inventive worlds and scenarios an AI might hallucinate for us, letting our guard down to enjoy the novelty of the experience they provide.
I guess I just want to ask you: if Orwell hadn't had his wartime experience with Stalin's forces, but had written the same 1984 that we know, would you really think less of the novel? And if 1984 had been written by AI, but went on to play the same cultural, historical, and literary role as the great work of dystopian fiction it is... Is its effect really so heavily devalued by its source?
> It feels forced to me, to insist that all human writing, no matter how fantastical/speculative/surreal, is a "direct extrapolation of the author's experience."
In the following passage, when I talk about surreal literature, where do I say anything about it being a direct extrapolation of an author's experience?
"If one goes to the farthest end of imaginative writing, human authors are still preferable to machines. Kafka on the Shore, for example, is entirely untethered from reality, as close to an abstract dream as literature can get. But it is great because Murakami expands on reserves of emotions to turn himself into the characters that were living as fragments inside of him."
It's in the previous paragraph, about 1984, "...Yet even these tales, though more fantastical, are direct extrapolations of the authors’ experiences..."
I assumed you meant your analysis of "fantastical" stories to carry through to your analysis of surreal ones, since those are overlapping, related subgenres. It seemed like you were implying a spectrum of more and less fantastical stories, from Gatsby to 1984 to Kafka on the Shore, so the points from the previous paragraph were still relevant. Please forgive the assumption.
So my follow up question is: do you really want to draw sharp distinctions between sub-genres, so that a book like 1984 gets its value from being a direct extrapolation of the author's experience, while a book like Kafka on the Shore isn't held to the same standard... But is somehow just as valuable?
I broke the novels up into three categories to show that in every case it's best to have a human writing, even if the reasons for why slightly differ.
1984 is a realistic book; thus it benefits from Orwell's real experience. Since he fought in a revolution, he could speak about it and imagine himself in it in a way that other authors (including computers) without that experience would struggle to. It's almost impossible for a guy who has never left his mother's basement to write that "true" a tale, all the way down the tiniest detail (even the rat torture was based off of a real event).
Kafka on the Shore is totally imaginative; thus it doesn't benefit from getting the same sort of details correct (that would be impossible). The reason Murakami's dreams feel believable is because they're true psychologically. He felt all of those emotions, lived as those different characters, and then recorded the experiences. Essentially he's an actor playing different roles. I have no desire to watch a robot actor even if his performance is as good as DDL in "There Will Be Blood." I want to know that a human is feeling and conveying what is inside of himself.
One way to refute the point I'm making is to give examples of novels where it makes no difference if a human or a machine wrote it. Do you have some? If so, why does it not matter if the author was human or not?
Thanks for the clarification! I actually really like the idea that we can categorize stories based on the relationship of the author's experience to the content of the text, that's cool. Sorry I was slow to understand what you were saying there.
As mentioned in my restack, I do think it matters whether a human wrote a given novel (or at least, it's certainly a valid thing to care about), I just don't think it's ALL that matters. You wrote, "...Had a computer written those words, the value to me would be exactly zero." This is a very strong claim. It raises alarm bells in the part of me that's learned to be wary of binaries and all-or-nothing thinking. All I have to do to refute it is point out something about the words in a novel that you agree would be valuable even if a computer had written them. Then I've shown an inconsistency in your beliefs. (Of course, then you can do with that what you will; it's not illegal to hold inconsistent beliefs.)
That's why I asked, in a previous comment in this thread, "...if 1984 had been written by AI, but went on to play the same cultural, historical, and literary role as the great work of dystopian fiction it is... Is its effect really so heavily devalued by its source?" (I have in mind the way it illuminated the insidious nature of authoritarian rule for a general audience, provided a language for future critiques of systems and technology, etc.). Similarly, with regard to the Henry Miller quote you love, I said in my restack that if it had been written by AI, "...at minimum, you now have a perfect and beautiful articulation of one of your most significant experiences. You have this for the rest of your life, and you can share it with others whose experiences are similar, blessing them in turn." Is there any value in this, in your opinion? I would love your thoughts on these two counterfactuals!
More generally, I want to make sure we're not confusing causal facts as evidence for value judgements. What I mean is, it's certainly true that 1984 heavily benefited from Orwell's lived experience. No one can refute that, it's a matter of historical fact. Likewise, it's true that "the reason Murakami's dreams feel believable is because they're true psychologically. He felt all of those emotions..." To the extent that these novels have any value, of course it came about as a direct result of the attributes of the men who actually wrote them.
But these contingent facts about causes offer no support for your judgement that, had they come about by other means (like computer), they would be valueless. Sure, they would lack the value that comes from the specific history we know they have in the real world, but that's baked into the thought experiment; that's just what it means to imagine them having a different origin. Our task, if we're discussing in good faith, is to take the counterfactuals on their own terms, and look hard for the potential value there. (For example, in addition to having similar cultural, historical, and literary effects as the Orwell-written 1984, it might be intrinsically beautiful or fascinating if a man in his basement can distill an AI-written 1984 from the latent patterns of the human language corpus, combining his imagination with the deep research and reasoning capabilities of an LLM to deduce details as granular and believable as required).
I say all that because you challenge me to "give examples of novels where it makes no difference if a human or a machine wrote it." If what you're asking me for is empirical causal-historical examples of actual AI novels as compelling as 1984... Well, AI is still brand new, and I don't think we have any of those yet. So it's an impossible request. That leaves us with counterfactuals, where my task is to suggest value the great novels would have had were they written by AI, and see if that shifts your intuitions at all. Which is kind of what I've been trying to do throughout our exchange, by offering the 1984 counterfactual, expanding your Henry Miller counterfactual a bit in my restack, and even bringing up Sanderson's Mistborn (I think a certain kind of epic fantasy, where the draw is about the puzzle-like intricacies of the magic system, is a good candidate for a genre where a lot of the value is preserved if an AI wrote it.) Anyway, you've tended to avoid engaging with the examples as I've brought them up so far.
> All I have to do to refute it is point out something about the words in a novel that you agree would be valuable even if a computer had written them.
I said "that passage." You could find a sentence from a computer-generated novel that has some value (e.g. description). But the general point still stands: I'm still not going to read passages of emotion if they from a computer.
> it illuminated the insidious nature of authoritarian rule for a general audience, provided a language for future critiques of systems and technology
This is a good point. IMO, the computer's role is to write an essay or make those points thru another medium. It might have been well suited to write something like "Politics & the English Language." But there's so much internal experience in 1984, I have no interest in reading that if it comes from a computer that can't feel.
> with regard to the Henry Miller quote you love
To me it has no value because I don't want a liar to give me a beautiful articulation of something they know nothing about. I want a truth teller to tell me how they really feel and to know that I feel the same. Maybe others feel differently, we'll see in time, I suppose.
So, no, I would not get any value from those books if computers had written them.