It has finally happened. 

All those wild futuristic movies about robots replacing, displacing, and inevitably erasing humans seem to have come to life, and we, ever the navel-gazers, find ourselves, not for the first time, fumbling for meaning in a world that stubbornly evades all attempts at one. 

The misery of the artist, of course, is paramount, for the world that once glorified their expression, often to a blasphemous extent, now replicates and mass produces it at the push of a button. 

But I will get to that in a minute…

Before pulling a Grim Reaper on AI, one must pause and wonder. This futuristic apocalypse is far from the first of its kind. 

We have seen it all before. 

The Calculator replaced clerks and bookkeepers.

The Mechanical Loom wiped out skilled weavers, leading to the famous Luddite movement where workers smashed machines that ‘stole’ their craft. 

The Printing Press erased scribes. 

The Tractor cut into the jobs of poor farmhands who knew no other way of winning bread for their families.  

Yet history tells us this: some arts may have withered, but others bloomed in their place. And humans always managed to keep their robots in check. 

So why has Artificial Intelligence unsettled us more than calculators, looms, and tractors ever could? 

If the past is anything to go by, it’s only fair to assume artists will eventually learn to live with AI rather than brood over their impending doom. 

Besides, contemporary theory has long displaced the grandeur once attached to the writer’s unique expression. 

Roland Barthes declared that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” Michel Foucault reduced the author to “a functional principle” rather than the origin of truth. Ferdinand de Saussure shook the foundations of linguistics by showing that words carry no inherent meaning. Derrida took it one morbid step further, revealing how writing endlessly slips across signifiers (words) without ever touching reality. By the time Baudrillard proclaimed that we live among copies of copies with no original truth behind them, the writer had already fallen from their pedestal. They were no longer prophets, and writing was not truth incarnate. 

Good writing, then, is not one that expresses something real, since language is inherently incapable of doing that, but one that exhibits a skilled interplay of words. 

This by no means is my attempt at condoning Artificial Intelligence, but it makes one wonder: how is AI writing inferior to human writing when both are so tragically incapable of reaching the truth? 

It would be unfair, in my opinion, to condemn AI, which is itself the result of human genius, simply because it robs some people of their jobs. 

We must prove that human art is and will always be superior – if that is indeed true. 

And for that reason, let me touch upon Aristotle. 

When Plato banished the poets from the Republic, accusing them of merely imitating reality, which is already an imitation of the truth (or ‘eternal forms’ as he put it), Aristotle, ever the rebel, stepped in and became the hero of artists. 

He declared that mimesis – that is to say, imitation – is second nature to humans. It is through mimesis that they learn, reflect and grow; thus, it doesn’t matter how removed writing is from the truth as long as humans derive pleasure from it. 

Seen this way, writing is not the product of original insight or divine revelation, but rather the result of a well-crafted imitation. 

It makes sense, then, that great readers make decent writers, and suboptimal readers make suboptimal writers. 

In other words, a great writer is a great copycat. 

That brings me to my point. 

The primary ethical concern with Artificial Intelligence is that, by replicating patterns of human expression, it risks being seen as theft rather than genuine creation.

Ironically, this is precisely what humans have always done: imitate patterns, rearrange words, and, despite that, perpetually fail at reaching the truth. 

I want to declare that there is a difference between human imitation and AI imitation, but unfortunately, popular culture has been thriving on lazy imitation long before AI entered the scene.  

BookTok favourites and New York Times Bestsellers are hardly ever literary masterpieces yet they dominate the conversation, while good, thoughtful books are often overlooked. Anyone with a decent taste in literature can tell these books are average at best: the writing is clichéd, the plot riddled with tropes. The authors (I shall refrain from mentioning any lest I offend anyone with poor taste) are clearly not concerned with writing well. They have no writing style to begin with. Their only goal is to whip up a bunch of adrenaline-soaked stories and make a quick profit. The publishers are no better. After all, they live in a capitalist world, where the aim is to sell as many copies to an attention-deficit audience as possible, not celebrate originality. 

So, for an industry obsessed with mass-producing recycled stories, is AI really all that evil? 

In my humble opinion, it is, in fact, the revolution literature has long been waiting for. 

Wait.

Hear me out. 

We have established that writing is merely an organization of words. 

Humans imitate patterns of this organization. 

So does AI. 

But Aristotle also insisted that not all imitation is equal. Some are better than others.

And I will go so far as to say that some writers imitate so ardently, so passionately that eventually they exhaust all there is to imitate, that is when their art transcends mimesis: at that point, all patterns dissolve and there is a rupture, both in the limits of language, and in the artist’s playful command of it. That is when their true voice, free from the echoes of its predecessors, finally breaks through the dark labyrinth of reused, recycled patterns of expression and beholds the light of day.

That is when expression finds justice. 

That is when originality is born.

And no one will dispute that AI is incapable of going beyond patterns. 

It is, therefore, not irrational to imagine that, thanks to AI replacing lazy imitators, good literature that merits critical attention will once again be sought and celebrated. 

Needless to say, writers, both serious and frivolous, have their work cut out for them. 

In retrospect, then, is the age of Artificial Intelligence an inevitable descent into dystopia or, on the contrary, a utopia in disguise?