As artificial intelligence continues to shape the landscape of literature, a compelling question arises: do readers care whether a text was written by AI? The answer depends on the reader’s expectations. Many may still prefer the “human touch”—the nuances, the imperfections, the lived experience that seem inherently absent in machine-generated content. Yet, as AI-generated texts improve in quality, the lines blur. Some readers might struggle to distinguish between an AI’s prose and that of a human, especially in more formulaic or genre-driven writing.

However, it’s not just about technical ability. Readers engage with literature on a deeper, emotional level. The question isn’t merely whether AI can mimic human style, but whether it can evoke authentic emotional resonance. While AI may excel at structure, its capacity for profound, lived experience—something inherently human—remains its greatest limitation. In the end, the value of a text lies less in its origin than in its ability to connect with the reader.

The two paragraphs above were written by ChatGPT based on a prompt I entered. Could you tell? I confess I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t done the prompting. It reads well, with few echoes or other literary problems that could make the text sound clunky, and no grammatical or punctuation errors. There’s an awkward jump between the penultimate and final sentence, but the ending connects back to the beginning in a compelling way. Overall, a solid 160 words—which is really scary for authors like me, who were convinced only a short time ago that AI-generated writing would come off as stilted and, well, robotic. In other words, we thought AI wouldn’t offer any real competition to creative types.

Time for a reckoning. I’m convinced that writing novels—a craft that one never really masters, where each book is a unique challenge—could now be, or at least will soon be, within the competent domain of artificial intelligence and the individuals who supply it with fine-tuned prompts. And that output might well be better than what I could produce. Better than the best scene I’ve ever written? Maybe, maybe not, but probably better than many that I’ve written.

It’s conceivable that we’ll soon have entire books written in the style of any famous author you can name. The estates of deceased, popular authors might commission those instead of hiring real people to continue that legacy and, more likely, new writers who want to become known as the next JRR Tolkien or whomever will put these AI tools to use. They’ll produce books in minutes or entire series in an hour that echo the desired style, slap their name on them with attractive AI-generated covers, and put them online for sale without even reading them through. Who has time for that? What they want is easy work—and maybe they’ll even sell some copies. Meanwhile, I’ll still be laboring on the pivot from Chapter 23 to Chapter 24 to make sure it strikes just the right chord of tension and dramatic irony, with the completion date for that book still a matter of speculation.

As with “deepfake” videos, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell whether a work is genuine—created solely from the imagination and skills of a writer—or produced by a machine trained on millions of books to regurgitate something “new.” A small company called Spine was launched in 2024 with a pledge to give readers over 8,000 AI-generated books this year alone. For comparison purposes, a Big Five publisher might produce 10,000 books a year but with huge staffs and numerous freelancers working long hours to manage that.

Book covers are increasingly made using AI graphics apps rather than depending on the creativity and skill of old-fashioned cover artists. AI narration tools can make an audiobook sound like it’s being read by any actor or other public figure. It’s a bad time to be a cover designer or an audiobook narrator. I love the work done by the narrators who’ve produced my audiobooks, and I’d use them again in a heartbeat, but how can they realistically compete in the marketplace against software that will not only give listeners the late, great James Earl Jones or any other distinctive voice but do so for free or only a small subscription fee?

For writers, book artists, narrators, we need to remind ourselves like a daily mantra that we do this for the love of being creative, for the sheer joy we feel bringing a story to life, not because of any potential monetary gain. There’s already precious little profit for most of us, and—if the scenario I’ve described above comes to pass—there could be even less still to go around.

Beyond the issue of making a living as a creative, though, competition for readers’ attention because of all these technological marvels will become that much fiercer, and the chance of an original, genre-changing talent rising above the noise will become less likely. Readers will find even more variety, of course, but will it soon become nearly impossible to discern what was written with soul…until that no longer matters to most people?