AI-Generated Literature

AI now has the ability to “write” novels, poetry, and other kinds of literature, a feat that is raising fundamental questions about this creative enterprise: Are the AI-generated works new literary genres, or simply imitations of established ones? What meanings can be gleaned from such works? Who is the author, the AI, the prompter, or both? What in fact is authorship, and has it become irrelevant in the Age of AI? Such questions will be addressed in this chapter, by examining AI-created works from the standpoint of literary semiotics and traditional literary criticism. AI literature also raises the overall question of what is a work of literature, and what functions it serves in human life. In the Print Age, the paper book became the physical form for creating literature. Its linear structure induced authors and readers to envision a flow of content from the past to the present and beyond. In the Age of AI this “time-binding” sense of historicity has been broken, whereby the past is becoming increasingly nothing more than what happened in the “last five minutes,” to cite Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, one of the first novels to deal prophetically with AI in the modern sense.