4. THE MASTER BUILDER

The separation of subject and technique is not yet complete. As I have said, AI systems do not yet write as well as the finest smiths of the sentence or the verse. But if Gutenberg’s invention launched a process of fusion that did not reach its apex until three and a half centuries later, I do not believe the process of scission will take nearly as long to materialize — far from it. ChatGPT’s public launch took place in November 2022, barely more than three years ago. Today, millions of users daily delegate to the machine the task of producing texts of every kind. Low-quality AI-written books are flooding Amazon. Writers will not say so, but with rare exceptions they too are using AI, to varying degrees, as a research tool or as an assistant for writing and revising their manuscripts. As the cliché goes (and it is true), in our era everything moves very fast. Compressed like a ZIP file, a century becomes a year. Leading AI companies, having already automated the bulk of programming work, now aim to automate AI research itself, which would lead to a recursive self-improvement loop and, possibly, an “intelligence explosion” (I.J. Good, 1965). Today’s “reassuring” observations — about what AI cannot do — may well be rendered obsolete tomorrow.

In the transitional period that is ours, we still have the opportunity to play a role in the making of text, provided we can mourn the Romantic fusion of technique and spirit. Writers can navigate the next five to ten years (the transition) by shifting their perspective on writing and adopting a new role in the construction of text.

Programmers are leading the way here. They have no choice, as progress in the automation of programming has been staggering. Anyone who has used Claude Code knows what I am talking about: someone with no programming knowledge can now give shape to websites and other digital objects by instructing the machine in natural language. I use the tool myself and am astonished by its capabilities. Claude Code offers the first imperfect glimpse of a “non-instrumental” world,¹ where desire becomes reality almost magically, the human bypassing the intermediate steps — marked by effort — that normally intervene between a wish and its fulfillment. In short, programmers barely type code anymore; they direct coding agents. They are no longer hands; they are master builders. Obviously, this is not without consequences: unless production increases enormously, far fewer master builders are needed than laborers. Experienced programmers are currently losing their jobs, and young coders can no longer break into the job market. Here is a profession already hit head-on by AI-powered automation.

Code is no doubt easier to automate than literary language and construction, which are finer and more subtle, but it is only a matter of time. Imagine a programmer who insisted on writing all their code by hand today. They would be completely left behind. The writer who insists on writing the entirety of their texts the old-fashioned way in 2027 or 2028 will find themselves in the same position of obsolescence. The only path forward I see in the coming years is that of the master builder. Writing will consist less in braiding sentences than in imagining a literary world and a literary language, and in bringing those imaginings into being by means of the machine.

Let us not forget that a large part of our creative activity already takes place outside composition proper. Think of the moment when we feel an intuition rising within us, when we name it, when we scaffold it, when we establish in our mind the connections that form the lineaments of the text to come. All of that will remain. The subsequent steps will vary from one author to the next. Some will want to use AI to develop an outline; others will use it to define the stage of enunciation; others, to conduct research; and so on. Some will prefer, on the contrary, to keep control over one or another of these steps — why not? What will change in any case is the execution. When one is ready to “write,” instead of lining up sentences one by one, one will be able to have the machine draft them. Sometimes one will have it write a fragment or a paragraph; sometimes a block of poetry; sometimes an entire scene or swathe of narrative. All of which one will revise as one goes, the way a master builder oversees the work of the crew.

I know that many writers will balk at such a prospect. I understand and accept this. I am speaking for those who wonder how to write — in the most vital sense — in the age of intelligence, not for writers who prefer to remain in the old regime.

In the nineteenth century, with the rise of the press and the serial novel, authors like Balzac and Dumas agreed to jump on the train of their era. They set about producing text by the mile, day after day, without waiting for divine inspiration. Balzac turned his body into a machine fueled by coffee. Dumas created a writing factory, with Auguste Maquet doing the research and “generating” the first draft, while the master builder (Dumas) went over the manuscript for validation and fine-tuning. These nineteenth-century authors turned themselves into machines. Sainte-Beuve despised what he called “industrial literature.”

The same contempt will fall on those who today decide to board the aircraft of intelligence. The twenty-first century will not lack for new Sainte-Beuves to decry “artificial literature.” Authors who decide to turn themselves into machines in the coming years will need thick skin. They will receive no institutional recognition, will be excluded from literary prizes and grants, and so on — just as Balzac was excluded from the Romantic cenacle of his time, which judged him mercantile and machinic.

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1. To borrow an expression from Nick Bostrom, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, Ideapress Publishing, 2024. ↩