Let’s get this out of the way: Sturgeon’s Law, ‘90% of everything is crap‘, isn’t pessimism, it’s statistics. That includes your favourite novel, the collected works of Joyce, and, yes, AI-generated text. The key point? If AI has the same bell curve as human output, some slice of that curve will still be better than what most people write. If Pareto’s Rule feels better at 80%, I’ll cede that ten points.
90% of everything is crap
— Sturgeon’s Law
And before anyone gets misty-eyed about “human genius,” let’s remember that the average American adult reads at a 7th or 8th grade level, and more than half read at or below a 6th grade level. Nearly 1 in 5 reads below a 3rd grade level. That’s not a moral failing, but it is a market reality. We can wail about AI not producing the next Nabokov, but let’s be honest, Nabokov isn’t exactly topping the Costco bestsellers table.
Here’s the bit nobody wants to say out loud
- AI doesn’t have to dethrone the literary elite. It just has to outperform the mass of competent-but-unremarkable human writers serving an audience who, frankly, doesn’t care about “stylistic nuance” or “metafictional self-reflexivity.”
- There’s a vast literary middle ground – corporate copywriting, trade journalism, formulaic romance, SEO blogs – where AI will not just compete, but dominate, because the audience is reading for function, not art.
- The high-literary crowd will remain untouched, partly because their readership fetishises human intentionality, and partly because AI doesn’t yet want to write about the precise smell of sadness in a damp Parisian garret in 1934.
The fearmongering about AI “killing literature” is a bit like saying instant ramen will kill haute cuisine. Yes, more people will eat the ramen, but Alain Ducasse isn’t sweating over his stock reduction.
More than half of American adults read at or below a sixth-grade level.
Sparx
This panic is not new. We’ve been here before:
- The printing press was supposed to obliterate the artistry of the hand-copied manuscript. Instead, it made books accessible and created new genres entirely. Calligraphy still exists, it’s just no longer the only way to get words on a page.
- Photography was going to end painting. In reality, it freed painters from the burden of strict representation, allowing impressionism, cubism, and abstract art to flourish.
- Recorded music didn’t destroy live performance, it expanded its reach. Some audiences still pay obscene amounts to see an actual human sweat on stage.
- Film didn’t kill theatre; it created a parallel art form.
- Synthesizers didn’t erase orchestras; they just meant you didn’t have to mortgage your house to hear a string section in your pop song.
AI is simply the next entrant in this long tradition of “threats” that turn out to be expansions. It will colonise the big islands of the creative archipelago – commercial writing, functional prose, genre boilerplate – and leave the small monasteries of high art mostly untouched.
So, no, AI won’t be the next Mozart, Picasso, or Nabokov. But it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to be good enough to meet – and occasionally exceed – the expectations of the largest share of the market. And given that most readers are happy if the plot makes sense, the spelling’s passable, and the ending doesn’t require a graduate seminar in semiotics to decipher, I’d say AI’s prospects are rather good.
Here’s why that 10% still matters
The rarefied work of the serious literary writer isn’t competing for market share; it’s preserving and evolving the cultural and linguistic possibilities of human expression. That work thrives not because it’s the only thing available, but precisely because it stands apart from the sea of functional prose, human or machine-made. The AI tide will rise, but the lighthouse will still be human.
Ridley Park 