Robots don’t need us to write great fiction. Let’s leave them to it

Fifty Shades of Grey

A large language model could only improve EL James’s deathless prose. After all, wherever new technology goes, porn follows, wagging its tail, so this seems like a natural fit. And so what if the machine accidentally gives Anastasia and Christian the wrong number of fingers or penises? We’ll have no kink-shaming here, please.

It Ends with Us

In her breakthrough novel, Colleen Hoover liked to bump up her word count with repeated references to marine-grade polymer chairs. (“Where’s a marine-grade polymer chair when I need one?”) So it follows that AI could make the book even bigger and better by describing all the other furniture in similar detail. And if you get bored with Hoover’s torture-porn iterations of abusive relationships – and who wouldn’t? – the book can double as a passable Ikea catalogue.

The Da Vinci Code

The renowned author Dan Brown may write prose that reads like a Wikipedia scraping, but we can do better than that – OK, faster than that – with AI. The technology will play to its strength of inventing false histories, so the solution to Robert Langdon’s quest will be entirely impossible to understand, requiring multiple reads and making this potentially the best value book you’ve ever bought. Facts? Where we’re going, we don’t need facts.

Prophet Song

Paul Lynch’s heavy-handed act of “radical empathy” (it says here) won the Booker despite its use of baffling made-up words like “she is suddened into the dark room”. This is ripe for improvement by a technology that loves to make stuff up. Soon you can read of how his heroine seas away to safetiness and groks her kids. (Relax, Paul – the AI will let you share the Nobel.)

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece

Tom Hanks’s novel has no plot and no peril? No problem! ChatGPT can fix that. We’ll just need to make a few changes. First, the hero is now called Sam Altman. He’s tall and handsome (you can play him in the movie, Tom). And he has an enormous – no, two enormous – what do you mean, unlikely? Haven’t you read Fifty Shades of AI?