‘AI will be the end of us’ – is Colm Tóibín right about the threat to creative writing?
‘AI will be the end of us’ – is Colm Tóibín right about the threat to creative writing?
Publish Date: 2026-03-04 09:35:00
Source Domain: theconversation.com
In 1950, William Faulkner delivered a famous acceptance speech for the Nobel prize in literature in which he rallied for the “inexhaustible [human] voice” and his belief in its supremacy – not merely to endure but to prevail. Faulkner reasoned this was because the human voice, transmuted into art, possesses soul – a soul capable of compassion and sacrifice.
Fast forward 75 years. Irish writer Colm Tóibín is asked about AI’s impact on writers in a newspaper interview. His wry response: “AI will be the end of us.”
Tóibín seems to believe that the triumphant human voice, one which writers and artists often cling to, will neither endure nor prevail. At least, not over the disruptive, transformative technology of Generative AI. He continued:
This idea [that] no machine could ever replace my sensibility, which is so rich, varied, complex, and arising from experience and from history – that’s all rubbish. You can actually manufacture that. And the more material they put into the machines, the more the machines will just learn about what sentences sound like, what rhythm is like. And the novelist can go and do something more useful.
Equally pertinent and pessimistic are the final pages of the late Cormac McCarthy’s penultimate novel, The Passenger. The great American writer had spent the last decades of his life studying complex adaptive systems at the Santa Fe Institute, writing: “In the end, there will be nothing that cannot be simulated. And this will be the final abridgement of privilege. This is the world to come. Not some other.”
William Faulkner at his typewriter in 1944.
Pictorial Press / Alamy
Art versus algorithm
What to do with such doomsaying? What can novelists and creative writing students say in our paltry human voices that won’t simply be co-opted for training data?
Well, it’s worth noting some hard truths first. Generative AI…
