“AI will be the end of us” – is Colm Tóibín right about the threat to creative writing?

In 1950, William Faulkner gave a famous acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature in which he championed the “inexhaustible (human) voice” and his belief in its supremacy – not just to survive, but to prevail. Faulkner reasoned that the human voice, when transformed into art, has a soul – a soul capable of compassion and sacrifice.

75 years later. Irish writer Colm Tóibín is asked in a newspaper interview about the impact of AI on writers. His ironic answer: “AI will be the end of us.”

Tóibín seems to believe that the triumphant human voice that writers and artists often cling to will neither endure nor prevail. At least not through the disruptive, transformative technology of generative AI. He continued:

This idea that no machine could ever replace my sensibility, which is so rich, varied, complex and born of experience and history – it’s all nonsense. You can actually make this. And the more…