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'Without books, we would not have made it': Valeria Luiselli on the power of fiction

The Guardian

I read an article the other day about a computer program that writes fiction. You feed it a few lines, tell it the genre – science fiction, horror – and it produces the rest. It writes in full grammatical sentences; comes up with metaphors and analogies; emulates a writer's particular style and so on. The author of the article, who seemed a little too thrilled about the existence of this diabolical toy from the depths of Silicon Valley says, at some point, that this "tool" was going to be the "salvation" for writers who dislike writing, which, according to him, is nearly all writers. I want to say to this writer: you are wrong. And to this robot that writes fiction I want to say … well I don't want to say anything to it because, you know, robots are robots.