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PAUL Lynch, Booker Prize winning author, emphasised the importance of authentic storytelling in the age of artificial intelligence (AI).

At the 44th Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF), recently, the author was asked about the “disconnect” that modern society is experiencing and how AI is changing the social and cultural landscape: How does he see it impacting literature? 

“It’s such an interesting and problematic question because we’re in this moment where AI can do a certain amount of things now – but it’s also constrained at the moment,” Lynch said to a packed room at the Expo Sharjah Centre in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.

“So, if your writing genre is fiction, really commercially-oriented fiction, I would be very worried. Because it (AI) is going to be able to do that very well pretty soon. And you might be out of a job.

“Anything that requires a deeper voice, anything where the writer’s voice has to be very unique, that’s when we have a little bit of grace for the writer right now. 

“The writer’s voice is so important because voice is the sound of you on the page. That unique feeling you get when you read Virginia Woolf, you know you’re reading Woolf and nobody else.

“When you listen to Seamus Heaney (Irish poet), you know that’s Heaney and nobody else. 

“You can’t quite articulate it. But what is it? It’s a feeling of life. It’s an attitude to the world. And inside that feeling of life, inside that attitude, is a whole of a life, a whole of experience, a whole of almost certainly pain and suffering and sensitivity that has brought them to that place to try and articulate something in language.”

He said putting out content that comes from the heart is really hard to emulate, which is something AI cannot copy.

“I think that in 20 or 30 years’ time when we get to superintelligence, all bets are off. But also all bets are off about us getting to superintelligence, anyway. 

“Because, frankly, what we’re doing in terms of how we’re unravelling things, we might not get there.

“If you start taking away all the entry-level jobs for 70-80 per cent of professions, then suddenly you’re going to have an entire generation who are going to become revolutionary because they have nothing to do anymore. 

“People work not because they need to. A lot of people choose their careers because it’s meaningful to them.

“Their work is vocational. It’s something that they get out of bed in the morning for. And many people are working towards finding that. And when they find it, that’s part of the reason why you’re here. 

“So, if you start to remove that from people, we’re not just going to sit around and watch Netflix all day and talk to AI and have a great time. You’re going to bring out some serious dark energy in people.

“They will undo it all. This is what the sort of the engineers of Silicon Valley don’t see. They don’t see the psychological in front of them. And it will come undone.”

He foresees Luddite-ism, a complete retreat from technology, happening. “I think it’s coming. I think that… a retreat from information, a retreat from data, a retreat from this overload of technological structure and intrusion into the self, I think we’re going to find a retreat from that.

“Because the fact is we evolved over millions of years in a world in which we were just beings in the real world. And you cannot keep imposing structures of pseudo-reality onto people without them coming undone. There will be a rupture.”

He dispels the notion of AI stealing writers’ voices in 20 or 30 years’ time. “I’m not sure we’re going to get there. I’ve got kids. It doesn’t make me happy to say that.”

He added that fiction has always been an extraordinary simulator for empathy. “When we think about Silicon Valley, working so hard to create virtual reality, and it’s been with us for hundreds of years. It’s called a novel.

“It’s a beautiful thing. You start reading some words and suddenly you are wherever you need to be and it’s not home. And you have that author whispering in your ear and you’re listening to, perhaps, a dead writer.

“You might be listening to somebody who died hundreds of years ago and you’re having a conversation with that writer. And you’re connecting in to the fundamentals about life. And I think that’s what really great writing should do.

“It should connect us, plug us back in. Even if it’s for 30 minutes in a day you’re connected back in. Yeah, there’s storytelling,” he said.

A former film critic and sub-editor at a defunct Irish newspaper, Lynch currently teaches creative writing in Maynooth University. 

His book ‘Prophet Song’ won the Booker Prize award in 2023. It revolves around protagonist Eilish Stack who is trying to keep her family together in a ‘post-truth’ world.

Her husband is arrested, her son has gone missing, and she is tasked to protect her family.