Xiaolu Guo: AI-esque

Novelist, memoirist and film-maker Xiaolu Guo delivers the 2026 New Statesman/Goldsmiths Prize Lecture, on the creation of fiction in the age of AI. The Goldsmiths Prize celebrates fiction that breaks the mould, and in its annual lecture series leading authors share their thoughts on the art of the novel. In this personal manifesto, Guo examines how AI permeates our creative life and daily tasks, focusing on how writers and artists are struggling to retain their sense of self as creators, and, arguably, face an existential threat to their profession. She contends that the value of the novel in the age of AI does not reside in its originality in any pure sense; literature has always been shaped by history, tradition, and social and psychological forces that account for its continuity as well as its transformation. Literature’s value today lies rather in a deeper truth about the human psyche: a novel reminds us that meaning and stories are not and cannot be machine generated – a novel is a living record of a lived experience. AI can reproduce patterns of language. It can simulate voices, compose symphonies, and manufacture plausible plot lines, but it cannot inhabit them, as we humans do.