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October 16, 2026
from “How LLMs Set My Fiction Free”
and
from “AI and the Future of Writing:
A roundtable of authors discuss the ramifications for art—and life.”
by Ayad Akhtar, Daniel Kehlmann, and Meghan O’Rourke
in The Yale Review
“If we really care about creative authenticity, then what we should safeguard is a conception of composition as a patient and entirely human process.”
Although many authors are wary of artificial intelligence and fear what Large Language Models will do to writing and reading in the future, a number of them have experimented with Generative AI chatbots as a way to take their writing in fresh and unexpected directions. We at The Humble Essayist (with, ahem, an average age of 77) are essentially Luddites, but for two weeks we will run features on work in The Yale Review which has published essays and discussions of what is likely to be the most important influence on writing in the twenty-first century: the “utterly amazing” and “very dangerous” Generative AI.
For some, like novelist Christopher Sorrentino, AI has made writing fun again providing fresh material that he painstakingly revises into fiction. For others, like the magazine’s editor Meghan O’Rourke, it is a dangerous temptation, replacing “intelligence and excellence” with “high productivity.”
It is interesting that both writers see patience as the humanizing element for future writers.
We give a sampling of both views here, but urge our readers to visit The Yale Review site here. It offers a variety of interesting essays and interviews on this important subject. Once on the page you may need to search under the authors' names to find their work.—THE
Paragraph of the Week
There is understandable anxiety about whether AI will displace the singular and distinctive creations of artistic vision. But LLMs have been in the picture for only a short time, while the most insidious enemies of that vision—cliché, predictability, risk aversion, an overriding concern for market success—have been with us for as long as we can remember. If we really care about creative authenticity, then what we should safeguard is a conception of composition as a patient and entirely human process of looking and feeling, of identifying what’s most useful among available material and recognizing when it’s been transformed into something new and unexpected. If generative AI can facilitate this sort of attention and experimentation, then the real failure will be refusing to engage with it. My own form of engagement has contained plenty of false starts and dead ends—that kind of failing endures—but it has led me toward work whose limits remain genuinely unknown.
Commentary
This is one of the things I feel most deeply: we live in a world that endlessly pushes us toward the product. We risk associating intelligence and excellence with high productivity. We’ve built a world that rewards this idea that you should be able to do all things seemingly effortlessly and never rest and never stop. And I do see the advent of AI as being very connected to that capitalist fantasy of always being able to do more. It’s the ultimate fantasy of the nerd who doesn’t want to have a body—the dream of being uploaded into an intelligence that never stops, never tires. I did experience a kind of frisson, early on, using it. I could do so much more with it! And yet it very quickly made me feel a bit ill. To be a writer is to learn the terrible lesson of patience. Not to get too earnest. This is a moment to celebrate that lesson of patience—and the messy, embodied, interpretive human intelligence that lives in more than language.
—Meghan O’Rourke
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Announcements
The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
See the trailers below to learn more about the book.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Available at Bookstores and Online
See more at the author's website and check out our video trailers here.
The Humble Essayist Press
Closes Book Publication Arm
The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
All of the press's publications are still available. You can find them here. The Humble Essayist will still carry on and continue to feature the Paragraph of the Week.
