The Concerning Rise of AI Fiction

On the disappearance of the literary voice

For fun, I asked ChatGPT to write a story about a girl who had just been broken up with. In less than five seconds, paragraphs appeared on my screen. What I read reminded me of airline food. It hinted at something real, it smelled a little like real food, yet you could tell it was not a complete meal. Chat used banal metaphors and cheesy lines, describing how her pain was “not loud, not dramatic, just steady like rain that refuses to stop” and how “healing, she realised, was not about forgetting Steve, it was about remembering herself.” All very nice, I guess.

An excerpt like this may seem harmless, but this is precisely what makes it dangerous. A text that is not bad enough to be unreadable yet clearly lacking everything that allows a story to speak to us can still carve out its own market. A quick search online reveals YouTube videos and masterclasses promising to teach/reveal how to write a whole book in a single day, sometimes reaching the astonishing record of 45 minutes. Books written with AI belong mostly to commercial fiction, such as harmony novels, which follow very similar plots and predictable endings. This has become a real business, with so-called ‘authors’ offering tips on how to bypass the limits of AI programs and other software to write explicit scenes, with various levels of creativity.

Moreover, the use of AI in book writing has massively increased the number of submissions to publishers, which were already high, making the submission process even more limited and difficult, if not often completely closed. This saddens me especially. When I was seventeen, I remember sending my first book to various small independent publishers. I had researched them thoroughly, compared their catalogues, written cover letters, and received both positive and negative responses. In the end, my book was published, even if, in retrospect, not everything we write at seventeen should be. Nonetheless, the entire process taught me a great deal, giving me the chance not only to work on my story with professionals without needing agents or intermediaries, but also to understand the publishing world and its mechanisms.

That this opportunity is now a distant dream for many aspiring writers, who seek a niche of people who believe in them and allow them to gain experience, is truly a shame. What makes a story are its imperfections, its inconsistencies. Perhaps this is also what we find beautiful in the classics, texts that were often published as serials in newspapers, such as the novels of Charles Dickens or Emilio Salgari, and were frequently not edited at all before going to print. The arrival of the editor had already introduced enormous changes, pushing many books to adhere to certain standards and styles, like the demonisation of adverbs that became widespread in the 2000s. I still remember my habit of highlighting each one of them when revising my short stories. With AI, this process could become even more extreme, producing texts that are increasingly homogenised and polished in pursuit of the absence of errors, leaving very little room for authentic expression.

Spanes, an Israeli startup founded in 2021, planned to publish 8,000 books by 2025, creating a system for editing, proofreading, formatting, and design entirely managed by AI, effectively replacing the work of three or four people. This would allow a book, instead of taking months or a year to be published and ready for readers, to be published and ready for readers in just a couple of weeks. Wonderful, isn’t it? Writing is no longer an art, but a product optimised for maximum sales at minimum cost.

The situation is complex and cannot be summarised in a short article. I am aware that AI is a growing field and that compromises with it are and will increasingly be necessary. Yet there is a certain concern, because the very heart of what makes a story alive lies in its imperfections, authenticity, and human intuition. Stripping these elements in favour of flawless, market-ready content risks producing words that are technically correct but emotionally inert.

Illustration by Ana Brockmann Aldasoro