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Will humanities literature withstand the onslaught of artificial intelligence?

2026-08-10 17:15:24Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA ÇAPAJEV GJOKUTAJ
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These notes show how literature has faced various rivals over the centuries, lost functions, but after each match has emerged closer to perfection and aesthetic essence. Finally, a few words are said about the question: Will human literature withstand the attack of artificial intelligence?

1.

For centuries, fiction has not been simply a genre of art, but the empire of the word itself. Within its lofty citadels, it housed almost all the intellectual and spiritual needs of society. From Homer's Iliad to the great tragedians of antiquity, to Dante's Divine Comedy and then Balzac's Human Comedy or Tolstoy's War and Peace, literature functioned simultaneously as a cosmology that explained the origin of the universe, as a moral treatise that guided human behavior, as a historical archive, as a cabinet of human psychology, and as a window to the entertainment or flight of the imagination. Opening an epic or a great novel meant entering the only fortress where the world could be conceived as a whole.

This picture has changed radically for a long time. The natural sciences and especially the social sciences have taken their due share. Psychology has entered and is entering all corners of the human being. Thus psychoanalysis attempted to dissect the subconscious with clinical instruments, neuroscience starts from the brain to reach psychology; sociology anatomizes the structures of society, while historiography and natural science acquired insights into the past and the cosmos. The writer is no longer the sole legislator or oracle of knowledge.

As if the centuries-old onslaught of science were not enough, in our days new 'invaders' have appeared at the gates of literature. Cinema, television, modern platform series and, especially, narrative video games, have taken away literature's monopoly on entertainment and the creation of imaginary worlds. The visual spectacle and interactive experience, where the player has a direct role in the event, give online fiction a sensory charge that it seems that written text has difficulty achieving.

2.

At first glance, this territorial withdrawal resembles a capitulation. Under the pressure of science and the moving image, literature seems stripped of its historical competences. But this withdrawal contains within itself a great paradox: we are not dealing with the tragedy of a destruction, but with an aesthetic liberation. By surrendering its didactic and utilitarian functions, literature has been stripped of responsibilities that do not actually belong to its nature, it has managed to have less didacticism and more art.

The surrender of these functions has not impoverished literature, on the contrary. As long as the novel or the poem had to do the work of historical chronicler or moral preacher, their inner freedom remained limited by the weight of these utilitarian obligations. The writer was forced to build large, often didactic, edifices to serve intellectual needs.

Freed from this burden of specialized sciences and new media, literature gained greater aesthetic autonomy, retreated from the breadth of the surface to enter the depth of art. In a word, the specialization of knowledge pushed literature towards the discovery of its most exclusive and inalienable territory:

Without this liberation, without the laboratory of psychoanalysis or linguistic research, it would be impossible to imagine the courage of twentieth-century writers such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, etc. to dismantle classical forms. Literature ceased to be a simple mirror that walks along the high road and became a microscope that records the finest fluctuations of consciousness and subconsciousness, the interior monologue, the broken psychological time and the fragmentarism of existence.

When the cinematic image took over the external appearance of the world, the literary text became aware that its power lies not in decorative description, but in stylistic dimensions. Language is no longer simply a means of transmitting an event, but the event itself. Linguistic ambiguity, subtle irony, layered metaphor and the musicality of the phrase became new 'territories'.

In this sense, the loss of its role as "teacher of the peoples" or "syncretic spectacle" helped literature become more of itself: a pure space of aesthetic inquiry, where it matters not only what is shown, but also how the world is experienced through the structure of the word.

3.

If the old fortresses fell and literature retreated to its innermost territory, the question that naturally arises is: why does this territory, certainly smaller but by no means more mutilated, remain impregnable? Why does modern man, surrounded by an ocean of images, algorithms, and rapid stimuli, continue to have a vital need for literary creation?

The survival of literature does not rely on cultural nostalgia, but on certain unique attributes that no other medium can simulate.

Today's world operates on the principle of fragmentation, accelerated communication (the culture of SMS, attention-suspension messages) and immediate eye-catching. In this dizzying environment, reading a novel becomes a radical act of resistance. It is an exercise in conscious slowing down, where the brain is forced to abandon the rhythm of mass distraction to harmonize with the profound slowness of thought. Literature is one of the few refuges where attention is not disintegrated, but rather rebuilt.

The camera may capture the trembling of a hand or the shadow of anxiety on an actor's face, but it remains outside and cannot reveal the broken syntax of a mind at the moment of moral choice, as in Dostoevsky's polyphony or the ambivalence of intertwined feelings as in Thomas Mann. Perhaps only the written word holds the key to entering this closed chamber of subjectivity. The visual image offers the finished world; literary language reveals it in the process of generation within consciousness.

A film or a video game are products with a high degree of visual determinism — they provide the character’s face, the light of the room, and the shape of the ready-made landscape. The spectator or player are mostly visual consumers. In literature, by contrast, whether traveling in the fantastic worlds of Gabriel García Márquez or in the extremely spare descriptions of Hemingway, the text provides only the visible parts of the iceberg: it is the reader’s imagination that must paint the light, clothe the character, and color the voice. This act of co-creation makes the literary experience deeply intimate and personal.

The production of a film or a narrative video game requires budgets in the millions, technical teams and inevitably submission to the logic of the market, commercial censorship or the consent of the majority. Literature remains among the freest and most autonomous mediums: it requires only an author and a blank page. From the visions of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley to the most hermetic contemporary experiments, this almost existential cost of production gives literature the freedom to be radical, heretical and to speak without having to negotiate with the expectations of the masses.

4.

Over the centuries, literature has repeatedly encountered "barbarians" who have crossed its borders, appropriated parts of its cultural territories, or even warned of its decline. However, as we saw above, it has always known how to turn these partial defeats into victories, renewing itself, reinventing itself, and rediscovering aesthetic depths it previously did not know.

But today, an unprecedented rival has emerged on its borders: artificial intelligence. Skeptics and alarmed theorists predict that this time the citadel of human literature is finally falling; according to them, the machine will completely replace the human creator, turning writing into an algorithm of perfect statistics, with novels and poems that feed rapid consumption and leave the reader without the living voice of the author. In this bleak vision, literary art is stripped of its mystery and transformed into a product generated with industrial efficiency.

On the other hand, the voices that defend human literature as one of the last bastions of humanism insist that the real writer can never be replaced by software. Literary art, according to them, is not simply a syntactic combination or an average of all previously written texts, but the product of a lived experience: of the aging body, of pain, of loneliness, of breathing and of the joy of existence. According to them, the text generated by the machine lacks the “labor” of creation, the moral intentionality and the conscious choice, because an algorithm can imitate the form, but not the inner spiritual conflict that gives rise to art. Consequently, generated literature will never be able to replace the real encounter between two human consciousnesses: the writer and the reader.

As in all discussions of this type, in addition to the pro and con groups, there is also an intermediate one that provides

a division of the literary market into two communities: on the one hand, fast-paced literature, prose and scripts (generated by AI or co-written with human editing) that feed the mass market of visual and digital entertainment. On the other hand, works where the main value will not be simply intrigue, subjects and entertainment, but the fact that behind the text lies another human consciousness with which the reader enters into dialogue.

The generation of commercial works by AI is not in doubt. Most technology experts agree that AI will soon reach the capacity to write complete, technologically flawless novels, short stories, and plays. Here, reaching the level of a commercial “bestseller” is a matter of time. AI is also proving to be an extremely effective imitation mechanism: it can write a poem in the style of Dante, a monologue in the style of Shakespeare, or a fragment in the style of Proust, because it has absorbed their entire linguistic corpus.

If we see literature simply as a well-written text, AI will be able to write it. But if we see it as a meeting between two human experiences of existence, AI will always remain outside this temple.

No one today can speak with absolute certainty about the fate of this historic match between literature and artificial intelligence. However, we, the generation that had human literature as the main source of intellectual, philosophical and aesthetic pleasures, find it impossible to imagine human consciousness finally defeated by the coldness of the machine.

Even if the machine manages to write the most perfect syntax, the true citadel of literature will always remain where the soul, imperfect experiences, and that inimitable human thirst to seek meaning through the written word are born.


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