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Literary credibility in the age of AI.

by Krzysztof Pelc

NAPOLEON’S FAVORITE BOOK of poetry was a fraud. He carried it through the Italian campaigns and still had it with him, years later, in his exile on Saint Helena. Attributed to an ancient Celtic bard named Ossian, the poems were presented as translations of a recently “discovered” third-century epic cycle. Raw, melancholic, and untouched by Christian pieties, Ossian’s poetry swept across Europe, fueled nationalist sentiment, shaped early Romantic taste—Goethe was a fan—and, improbably, became Napoleon’s bedside read, even as many of Europe’s literary scholars suspected it of being a forgery. Today, Ossian is a curiosity with which hardly anyone bothers.

As odd as the episode now seems, it was less an anomaly than a recurrent symptom of a certain kind of malaise. Late 18th-century Europe was gripped by nostalgia for imagined pasts unspoiled by the perceived corruptions of modern life. Writers and readers alike yearned for the sublime, for sentiment, for a “natural” folk genius unburdened by learning. Ossian’s songs—primitive, elemental, unmediated—offered what the existing canon could not: the promise of uncontaminated origins.

We have, I believe, crossed a new threshold, and all authored writing—novels, poems, screenplays, newspaper columns, not to mention love letters—will be judged according to which side of that divide it falls on. On one side are texts produced before the arrival of generative large language models (LLMs). On the other, everything that has followed—texts that might still be useful, even compelling, but that will always face a lingering suspicion of not being entirely human, of having been smoothed by systems trained to predict the word that comes next. We will come to prefer the former over the latter, not because it will be better, but because we will be more certain of its origins.

by Natsuko Fukue and Atish Patel

Kyoto – Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of AI.

Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the country’s enduring love of paper in the digital era.

“I think (paper) is a medium that engages all five senses, (unlike social media),” says 40-year-old photographer Kazuma Obara.

Obara and his creative partner Akihico Mori are among the latest artists to use a printing press offered by the Kyoto Shimbun newspaper, which is aiming to find alternative uses for its machines as subscriptions fall.