Who will live inside the books?

As a simple and common reader, I always suffer from an overwhelming feeling that attacks me mercilessly when I enter a library or a well-stocked bookstore. And it is the incontestable certainty that the time of my life will not be enough for me to know so many of the people who live within those books and who deserve to be known, and to be able to catch a glimpse of the soul of so many things, the passions of that million characters

And the experience of reading – and we all know that – is unique and unrepeatable not only as an aesthetic pleasure or a means of learning, not only as a way of appropriating stories, characters, of acquiring information of all kinds, but as a means to, by knowing others, know ourselves better. To live other lives.

The writers who live inside the books leave on those bound pages ways of seeing life, of interpreting reality, which are usually the fruit of an expressive need and, also, of a desire to communicate to us a peculiar vision of a world. And, if it is about artistic literature, it must result in an effort to capture the immeasurable density of the ins and outs of the human condition and, in addition, with the intention of manifesting it with beauty. Perhaps that was why Hemingway often repeated that writing (literature), and doing it well, has never been easy.

Everything said so far may seem like a string of truths so elementary that it would perhaps have been unnecessary to write them down. But I have preferred to do so in the face of the explosion of a reality in which we already live and threatens to turn Flaubert's pretension, Hemingway's certainty and even José Saramago's poetic image of books into ancient history. Because the time is coming when, instead of people, algorithms managed and ordered by machines wander among the virtual pages of books, a time when writing is very easy.

I still have confidence that a piece of news that has alarmed me is false. But even so I think it should be commented on, since its alleged falsity could well be temporary. And a few weeks ago several web sites published that Amazon, the largest market for everything salable in the world, even owner of the most powerful commercial space for selling books, announced that, of self-published electronic texts written with the tools of artificial intelligence, it would only allow a maximum of three works by the same author to be placed on its shelves. Three works every day, he added the information read.

Although the figures used in the news are so ridiculous that we can doubt their veracity, the truth is, in any case, that the overwhelming arrival of AI to our world is already an ongoing reality. The creation of an instrument like ChatGPT for writing texts has become a commonly used tool in many different scenarios. In the academic field, for example, their collaboration is increasing in the writing of coursework and even theses of different categories. In the advertising and business sectors, among others, its use is increasingly used and, apparently, even very efficient since it allows us to save time and even precision in data management. Meanwhile, its use for literary creation may be increasingly widespread and being taken advantage of (some confess partially) even by professional writers. And none of this would be bad if we approached the use of this technological instrument with the most basic ethical conditions.

I want to take it for granted that—at least for now—the artistic quality of these works written with the help of AI must be at least doubtful and that, possibly, their contents can never come close to the subtleties of literature created by a human with claims to reach “the soul of things”. I would also like to trust that good readers will not be easily fooled, although not all readers are good, nor are writers, even if they use other people's intelligence.

But the mere existence of a possible avalanche of texts manufactured with digital tools endangers an entire conception of creation and culture that has accompanied us since the times of Homer, Herodotus and the biblical editors who, by the way, to write their works , some had the help of the muses and others with the support of God, who supervised the writing of their doctrine, placed in the hands of human beings.

The most optimistic think that no instrument created by human intelligence will be able to surpass or replace it, and perhaps they are right. On the other hand, without advancing our capabilities, these tools of processing, organizing and recreating information can supplant us in many manifestations and do so with the dark ability – also of human origin – of power or, at least, try to deceive us, since plagiarists and creators of hoaxes are older than computers.

In a market as capricious and unfortunately commercialized as that of books and literature, it is becoming more difficult every day for authors to carve out a space for themselves, to find readers. The writer who truly claims to be one must fight, for example, against the not-so-recent phenomenon of best sellers published by the influencers (or by their amanuenses) and also against the growing presence of books with specific topics written with market research and commissioned by publishers who, even before the consigned works are written, can reward them with monetary generosity.

This complex panorama where the artistic, the commercial and technological advances mix, reveals a reality in which artificial literature can cause a true cultural cataclysm. And, the worst thing is that everything seems to indicate that we have no shields to defend ourselves from that attack and save the existence of those people, with human passions and whims, who until now we have seen live within books.

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