{"id":219935,"date":"2026-03-04T09:35:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T14:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/04\/ai-will-be-the-end-of-us-is-colm-toibin-right-about-the-threat-to-creative-writing\/"},"modified":"2026-03-04T17:10:26","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T22:10:26","slug":"ai-will-be-the-end-of-us-is-colm-toibin-right-about-the-threat-to-creative-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/04\/ai-will-be-the-end-of-us-is-colm-toibin-right-about-the-threat-to-creative-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018AI will be the end of us\u2019 \u2013 is Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn right about the threat to creative writing?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/ai-will-be-the-end-of-us-is-colm-toibin-right-about-the-threat-to-creative-writing-275898\">\u2018AI will be the end of us\u2019 \u2013 is Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn right about the threat to creative writing?<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/ai-will-be-the-end-of-us-is-colm-toibin-right-about-the-threat-to-creative-writing-275898\">https:\/\/theconversation.com\/ai-will-be-the-end-of-us-is-colm-toibin-right-about-the-threat-to-creative-writing-275898<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-03-04 09:35:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"theconversation.com\">theconversation.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>In 1950, William Faulkner delivered a famous acceptance speech for the Nobel prize in literature in which he rallied for the \u201cinexhaustible [human] voice\u201d and his belief in its supremacy \u2013 not merely to endure but to prevail. Faulkner reasoned this was because the human voice, transmuted into art, possesses soul \u2013 a soul capable of compassion and sacrifice.<\/p>\n<p>Fast forward 75 years. Irish writer Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn is asked about AI\u2019s impact on writers in a newspaper interview. His wry response: \u201cAI will be the end of us.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>T\u00f3ib\u00edn 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: <\/p>\n<p>This idea [that] no machine could ever replace my sensibility, which is so rich, varied, complex, and arising from experience and from history \u2013 that\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n<p>Equally pertinent and pessimistic are the final pages of the late Cormac McCarthy\u2019s 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: \u201cIn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>              <span class=\"caption\">William Faulkner at his typewriter in 1944.<\/span><br \/>\n              <span class=\"attribution\">Pictorial Press \/ Alamy<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>Art versus algorithm<\/h2>\n<p>What to do with such doomsaying? What can novelists and creative writing students say in our paltry human voices that won\u2019t simply be co-opted for training data?<\/p>\n<p>Well, it\u2019s worth noting some hard truths first. Generative AI&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/ai-will-be-the-end-of-us-is-colm-toibin-right-about-the-threat-to-creative-writing-275898\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u2018AI will be the end of us\u2019 \u2013 is Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn right about the threat&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":219936,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/720974\/original\/file-20260227-57-clbx2v.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.0&rect=0%2C161%2C3316%2C1658&q=45&auto=format&w=1356&h=668&fit=crop","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[19],"class_list":["post-219935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-generative-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219935"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219935"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":219937,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219935\/revisions\/219937"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/219936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}