Every generation believes it has witnessed the end of something. Yet the things we make never truly end; they only evolve.

While having my morning tea, I found myself staring through the window at the fortress perched atop the mountain. Today, I wasn’t feeling as motivated to write as I used to be a while ago. AI might steal our jobs, but it is too early to jump to the conclusion: AI will dominate literature in the future. As I saw a flock of birds flew toward the sun, I asked myself, why do we write? Where does literature really come from? Does it arise from language, vocabulary, grammar, or pure imagination?

Perhaps there’s something more.

What if it comes from the unknown, the space we always leave for uncertainty? Before inviting anyone from the literary community to support my argument, I would like to call upon a physicist. Enter Werner Heisenberg.

One of the founders of quantum mechanics, who demonstrated that uncertainty is not only a defect of our instruments but a fundamental feature of reality. The universe refuses absolute certainty.

(Read this brilliant essay on Uncertainty Principle and AI )

Literature, too, seems to mirror this law of physics.

The more a writer tries to make a story seem logical, symmetrical, and explainable, the less alive it becomes. Great fiction is full of unanswered questions, contradictory characters, unexplained desires, philosophical taboos, and endings that refuse to close the doors completely. Readers return to these works not because they provide certainty and perfect dogmatic answers but because they preserve mystery… the mystery of our lives, our universe.

Every memorable novel contains an element that cannot be measured. The silence. The hesitation. The ambiguity. The soul. The divine. The vast grey area between absolute Yes and No. Like Heisenberg’s insight, it reminds us that the pursuit of precision always leaves something beyond measurement.

But uncertainty alone does not create anything, let alone literature; it needs another friend, from another world. Leaving physics behind, let’s jump to our ever-evolving tool of literature: Language.

We, human beings, are always in search of something new. We get easily bored with what we already have, don’t we? And language is no exception. But how does it become new and evolve? Can AI predict how language is gonna be used in the future or how it will evolve? To support the next argument, we welcome William Labov.

(Sociolinguistics in age of generative AI)

According to his sociolinguistic theory, language change begins with everyday speakers and spreads through social interaction. For example, going to became gonna, and going to also changed from expressing movement to marking the future, as in “It’s gonna rain today.” In Old English, will meant ‘want to’ and now it is used to express future outcomes. Similarly, Gen Z words like vibe, ghost, and rizz became part of English with their multifaceted meanings, because people adopted them.

AI can create thousands of words, but we are too reluctant to accept anything unless we collectively choose it to occur within society. AI cannot independently make language evolve because it learns from existing human language. And how the language will evolve remains uncertain.

Now we know that the future of language is safe and mostly in our picky hands. Let’s talk about another ingredient: Memory!

Enter Marcel Proust.

In his book In Search of Lost Time, a single madeleine dipped into tea unfolds an entire childhood. A forgotten underworld, buried beneath years of dull and ordinary life, suddenly returns with clarity. Today, psychologists refer to this phenomenon as the Proust Effect, the remarkable ability of smell and taste to awaken vivid autobiographical imagery, completely involuntarily.

(Read the Proust Effect: why Scents evoke memories)

No writer could plan these moments ahead. A scent of the damp soil enters through your window, and the series of memories it brings back to life is always out of our control.

You grow tired of sitting in the same posture for too long. You rise from your ugly work-from-home chair, wander through the house, and enter the kitchen. You inhale the smell of tea and burnt milk. Something stirs within you. The spark turns into a wildfire of imagination if it meets your buried memories. Within seconds, the gap of decades disappears. The writer is no longer remembering. The writer is there. An internal monologue starts to take shape. Description writes itself. And the beauty is: it was all out of the writer’s control. You rush back to your desk. Dang! That’s a poem you always wanted to write.

AI might not lose the battle of IQ against us, but literature is much more than intelligence and imitation. It is consciousness meeting memory. Every sentence written by us carries invisible companions: forgotten afternoons, private griefs, accidental joys, embarrassing silences, childhood fears, first loves, and last conversations. They remain beneath every line, like roots beneath a forest.

Our advantage is that AI has no hidden past, no private memories waiting to take the shape of fictional characters or imaginary incidents needing confessions. AI does not like to dwell in the realm of unanswered questions, where art and literature take shape (at least for now). The greatest novels are not perfect series of incidents or underlying systems that always work, but imperfect, broken lives (does AI understand how a broken life smells like?) put together by a tool called language.

Literature is, in many ways, about things we don’t fully understand, even after writing them down.

Even if AI someday learns to imitate every literary technique, one question will remain unanswered: can imitation produce the inner necessity from which literature is born? AI might be a great problem solver. We, human beings, are mystery-makers. Mysteries that will never be solved but passed on through our cleverly chosen words and symbols.

What words like Tea, Birds, Morning and Mountain inspire you to write? Or would you rather look out of the window yourself?

About Author

Divyank Jain is the author of ‘In Search of the Lambs’ and serves as Managing Editor of The Hemlock Journal. He holds master’s degrees in English Literature and Commerce. His writings have appeared in journals/magazines including Novus Literary Journal, Boudin (by McNeese Review), International Human Rights Arts Movement Press, Active Muse, Firefly review, and others. His short story, Out of the Ring, was printed and distributed across Belgium alongside Kermesse magazine by 16 Pages Press. He has also co-authored numerous anthologies.