In 1967, Roland Barthes said that “the birth of a reader will have to be paid for with the death of the author.” But when AI takes its first steps in writing fiction, it seems like technology could one day make Barthes’ metaphor all too real.
AI is constantly and irreversibly getting closer to writing a coherent novel. ScriptBook develops artificial intelligence for writing movie scripts. According to company representatives, by 2025 the algorithms will write scenarios that are better than those written by humans. If there is an opportunity to get a decent scenario from artificial intelligence, then a novel composed by machines cannot be far behind. Literature needs two hearts: the heart of the author and the heart of the reader, but when in the future you find a novel by an unknown author and find it really good, would the book become less moving if you found out that it was created using groundbreaking artificial intelligence ? After all, according to Barthes, “it is the language that speaks, not the author. A writer can only imitate a gesture that is always prior, never original ”.
