Can AI write a Booker prize-winning novel?

Listen to Alexi discuss AI literature with Booker Prize judge Erica Wagner, The Observer’s books editor Tom Gatti, and author Ada Barumé on the Slow Newscast here.

Cormac McCarthy is one of my favourite writers. If you haven’t read him, skip The Road, his dystopian novel made famous by the 2009 film of the same name, and pick up All The Pretty Horses instead. It’s McCarthy’s 1992 classic. And it’s beautiful.

Or just download Claude, the generative AI from Anthropic. Because there’s a fair chance you won’t be able to tell the difference.

Last week, the New York Times ran an experiment that has far-reaching implications, especially for book lovers. It asked readers to compare five pairs of writing samples – one written by AI, the other by a well-known author – and choose which they preferred.

Compare these two passages:

1 It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

2 The boy asked his grandfather why the old church had no roof. The old man said weather and time and indifference. The boy asked if someone could fix it. The grandfather said yes. But no one would. Things were built and things fell down and mostly people just stepped over the rubble on their way to somewhere else.

One is written by McCarthy, the other by AI, specifically a sophisticated version of Anthropic’s Claude called Opus 4.5 (you can see the answer below). In the New York Times poll, only 50% identified the human author correctly. We might as well have flipped a coin.

In late 2022, I appeared on The News Meeting, our podcast about the stories that should lead the news. I pitched ChatGPT, which had launched only days earlier, as the top story because I thought it would change how we process information for ever. What I didn’t realise was how good AI would become at mimicking creativity.

For years, we’ve worried about what AI will do to junior-level accountants, or PhD theses, or coding. These are still valid concerns. But the Claude test suggests we should have been thinking more broadly. What happens when AI can create literature?

If you asked Claude today to write an entire novel – or even a short story – it’s clear it couldn’t do so convincingly. Budding McCarthys are safe for now. But in four years? Ten? It’s not outrageous to think that by 2030, even a Booker prize judge may struggle to distinguish a literary novel penned by a human from one generated by AI.

Outraged by this disruption to their 6,000-year-old industry, publishers and authors seem to be directing their anger too narrowly.

Last week, thousands of authors published an “empty” book to protest against AI firms using their work without permission. The Authors Guild has just introduced “human-authored” certification to certify books that were “not generated by AI”. Aside from the fact that many writers I know already use generative AI, Claude’s prowess suggests the horse may already have bolted.

The problem with AI isn’t that it will generate slop, a never-ending stream of rubbish airport novels. It’s that it might produce something that is genuinely good.

It’s not just literature facing this question. Last week, I came across some fantastic soul remixes of classic 2000 rap songs on Spotify, such as this 1950s soul version of Outkast’s Ms Jackson. I saved them to a playlist and forwarded them to some friends. Then I discovered they were generated by AI (I should have guessed: the artist is called Soul’d Out).

Discovering the songs’ inauthenticity was disappointing. It put me off them. Listening again there was a uniformity about the vocals, an artificial perfection I hadn’t noticed before. But fast-forward a few years and what then? New music, new paintings, new novels – produced at unprecedented scale. It could be seductive, at least at first. Except, of course, none of what AI “creates” will be truly new. Like the soul remixes, it will be derivative of what’s gone before.

Human writers have always worked within a tradition. A novel, as Roland Barthes said, is just a “tissue of quotations”. But Walter Benjamin, the German philosopher, argued that even the finest reproduction is “lacking in one element: its presence in time and space”. That is the danger of AI literature: that it traps us in a doom-spiral of nostalgia, unmoored from time and space, just a constant remix of the past.

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Answer:

1: From Blood Meridian (1985) by Cormac McCarthy

2 From Anthropic’s Claude, Opus 4.5

Photograph by Getty Images