Fakes of the Future
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.
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