The other day I decided to see how easy it would be to translate my Armenia novel “An Excess of Nationalism” into Spanish. There is a huge community of Argentine/Armenians I want to target. I found a new free AI, uploaded the manuscript and in 4 minutes it was spit back out at me fully translated — including formatting and pictures. It was not perfect (maybe 95%), and is currently being proofread; but a $2000 three month translation job just became a $200 one-week proofreading job. Professional translators must be very concerned.

Which got me to thinking about AI and literature. Writers are worried that AI will write all the books going forward; that they will ingest Hemingway and Stephen King and regurgitate a story in short punchy sentences about a fisherman attacked by a clown.

Maybe. I was having a conversation about AI with my brother last week; he brought up the point (which I hadn’t thought about) that as AI trolls global content and synthesizes it, not once but over and over again we will get to a point where AI is writing books taken from other AIs who themselves copied it from other AIs who synthesized it from an original work. In this case, the 95% of my translated novel goes down to 90% and then 85% and 80%. It reminds me of the Michael Keaton movie “Multiplicity” — “You know how when you make a copy of a copy, it’s not as sharp as… well… the original?” while his clone’s clone shaves his tongue in the background.

That.

I’m reading Milan Kundera right now, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” — “Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.” Exactly. Could an AI say this? Great writing comes from the sentient experience of living; reflecting upon what was lived for posterity. For a writer to call out an “avalanche of words” is, I know, a little ironic (and somewhat myopic). It could be argued that the “market” should decide, but for any of you who have spent any time on Twitter or TikTok — that is the market. Can we really expect that crowd to source the next Herman Melville? And remember, Moby Dick only sold about 25 copies a year before Melville died, and was only a best-seller much later.

I wonder if the “…avalanche of words” we’re gonna get from AI (that we’re already getting from Amazon KDP) is maybe a good thing. True literature, good literature, timeless literature cannot be divorced from the writer. Would Kundera’s “Unbearable Lightness of Being”, a love story about a man and two women set against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, mean anything if I didn’t know that Kundera had lived those impossible years. That he was in fact a dissident writer who suffered under the Soviets (and in fact was denied a Nobel Literature Prize due to occupation politics). Would Rose Macaulay’s “Towers of Trebizond” still retain its power if I didn’t know that she had taken a trip to Asia Minor 100 years ago to watch the dying of an empire?

Would my Armenia novel be any good at all, if it was not about a lost writer I discovered (Gurgen Mahari), a refugee from genocide, who became a communist, who was exiled to Siberia by Stalin, who married his Lithuanian love and returned to Yerevan only to die of a broken heart amid bonfires of his finest work? And if the story itself didn’t ooze, didn’t drip with my own impressions of living where Mahari lived and walking where he walked? Probably the Twitteratti don’t care, but those looking for a real experience — a more intense significance — would probably notice. And it is for them we write anyways.

“Write what you know,” and “write who you are” are the advice given new writers. AI knows nothing, and is nothing. There is no connection to the human experiment. I wonder if AI produced literature will be the spark and fodder for a great fire, burning away the underbrush of overproduction leaving lasting only the mighty trees to stand alone un-impeded by unworthy competition. Or, better said, will people return to stories written by writers who connect them back to the “années folles” of 1920s Paris (which is where all writers want to live), to the dying days of an ancient empire, to the struggle for freedom in South Africa or so many other of humanity’s epic moments? We can only hope that after the “avalanche of words” greater appreciation will emerge for work that resonates with life.

That is, after all, what real literature is about.