Literary invasion: what does it mean for writers if AI written stuff is deemed the best by the most discerning?

The immediate consequence of last week’s events will be excessive caution. Editors, publishers and juries around the world will run every submission they receive through AI detectors to make doubly sure of the provenance of whatever they select, but since those filtering techniques are themselves probabilistic, there is every likelihood that at least a few pieces of human writing will also get caught in the dragnet.

This is exactly what we should not be doing.

Given the rapid pace at which AI has improved in the last year alone, this may well be the last time we will be able to detect the hand of AI in what we read. Rather than blame an award jury for not being able to tell whether what they were reading was crafted by AI, we should be reflecting on what it means for writing now that AI is good enough to trick the most discerning of us.

Attempting to ban AI-use for writing, as many are keen to do, would be futile. AI is a tool and writers have always used tools to enhance their craft.

Each time a new technology has become available—when we switched from legal pads to typewriters and then from typewriters to word processors—there have always been those who warned that no good would come of adopting these new-fangled techniques. But we went ahead anyway, learnt the new possibilities these tools enabled and expanded our craft in wondrous ways.

Sure, AI is in an entirely different class as a tool. Every other tool that writers use helped produce content. AI is the first that can actually create it. If the quality of what it makes is disappointing, it is because we are still learning to use it. With a little time and practice, that will change. Once we have mastered its use, AI-generated content will be as good as anything we produce ourselves.

As regular readers of this column will attest, I have been using AI to assist my writing long before it was popular. When I first wrote an article entirely with AI as a gimmick, it was so hard to get it to pass as even vaguely human that I had to painstakingly prompt the article into existence one sentence at a time.

Since then, I have incorporated AI into my process in as many ways as possible—to the point where I can no longer tell which part of my article came from AI and which did not. I use it for research, for fact-checking and to find the exact right words to use to make the most convincing argument. The more I use it, the more surprised I am at how rapidly it continues to improve.

But because I use it so much, I am also acutely aware of all it cannot do.

AI conversations are constrained by what they can hold in active memory. Modern models claim context windows of up to a million tokens, but coherence degrades long before the window fills. Characters drift, plot threads slip and what was established in chapter two no longer shapes chapter 12. Which is why, when friends in publishing lecture me about the shortcomings of AI, I stay silent—a full-length AI-generated book is still hard to create.

Last month, I decided to see if that was still true. Has AI advanced enough for me to fashion a writing system that can produce book-length fiction entirely on its own?

To properly validate this thesis, I forced myself to work under a single, clearly defined constraint: not a single word of the final text could come from me. While I could provide feedback on whether a given passage worked or not, much like a human editor working with an author would, I would not, under any circumstances, tell the model to include specific words or phrases in the text.

In 10 days, we were done. Starting from a single prompt that offered broad suggestions on plot, we were able to produce a 75,000-word book. It took multiple conversations back and forth to work out the structure, characters, locations and narrative devices, and several iterations to address internal consistency, but in the end, every word of the final product was generated by AI.

You can read it, in full, at the-recognition-problem.com where the entire story has been laid out, chapter by chapter, on a website built by AI.

In the ‘Making’ section of the website, there are details on how I created it, the scaffolding I built and the story bible that served as the ‘long-term memory’ that AI lacks.

And, for those who care about these things, the argument I had with Claude over who should claim authorship over it.

This is not the best book you will read this year. It will not win me prizes or commendations. It is, however, an example of what AI is already capable of.

And a sign of things to come.

The author is a partner at Trilegal and the author of ‘The Third Way: India’s Revolutionary Approach to Data Governance’. His X handle is @matthan.