Israel Centeno

In this new phase some have called the techno-era, one question imposes itself: how can we recognize a work that has been constructed entirely—or at its vital core—by artificial intelligence? The answer lies, as it always has, in the detail.

Artificial intelligence is incapable of producing detail with depth, and even less of going beyond the detail: of probing it, complicating it, turning it into a wound—and into healing. A human author, on the other hand, uses their subjectivity to delve into the wound, and from that space—from the strange, from the unpredictable—they create their own aesthetic and human path.

Let’s return to the example of Crime and Punishment. What would have happened if that novel had not been written by Dostoyevsky? Imagine someone without his torn biography: his radical youth, his imprisonment in Siberia, the simulated execution, his epilepsy, his religious conversion, his solitude and poverty, the cultural weight of Russia in tension with Europe, and above all, his inner struggle with evil and with God. None of this can be produced by a machine.

Because Crime and Punishment is not just a great story; it is Dostoyevsky speaking through Raskolnikov. It is his experience, his pain, his vision of the human soul. AI can generate a nihilistic student, even one who kills. But it will never create the Slavic spirituality that is felt in every page, that tension between East and West, between the redeemable and the irredeemable. That is not in the data—it is in the spirit.

So, what should we look for as readers? In my case, I look for formal ambition, I examine how the author builds structure, how they manage rhythm, the links between cause and consequence. If I see that the narrative obeys a predictable formula, I grow suspicious. AI excels at formulas. But when the text breaks the formula, when absurd, uncertain, or even imperfect consequences arise, there we see the human presence. There we see their struggle, their hesitation, their mark.

And in poetry, the difference is even more radical. There is no way to ask AI to write The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. It will not understand its connection to the quest for the Holy Grail, nor incorporate Anglo-Saxon modernism with biblical, Hindu, and Shakespearean echoes. Poetry is a mystical act. And the mystical cannot be simulated: it either manifests or it does not.

Poetry is not a motivational message. It is not a set of clever phrases. It is a prayer that moves not from flesh to flesh, but from spirit to spirit. And that connection will never be generated by a machine that merely collects and organizes data, no matter how vast its archive.

Yes, artificial intelligence can organize ideas, correct errors, suggest structures, and produce a polished result. But in that correction, the human tremor is often lost. The meaning that escapes perfect grammar. The meaning that only emerges when someone wrestles with a sentence as one wrestles with fate.

Today, formulas abound. So does hypocrisy. Many will say, “I don’t use AI,” or “I don’t know what that is.” But I dare say that nearly everyone has experimented with these systems at least once. What few are willing to admit is how much of their voice they have already surrendered.

That is why signing a work, far from being an act of vanity, is an affirmation of experience. The author does not sign to become famous, but to say: this—what is written here—was not lived by another; this vision has been filtered through me, my spirit, my story.

Artificial intelligence has no story. No flesh. No soul. No struggle. Yes, it may produce what is plausible—and plausibility is indeed desirable in fiction. But it cannot go further. It cannot reach the true. Because the true in literature is not merely what seems real—it is that which reveals a unique, irreproducible human experience, charged with spirit.

It can imitate form, reproduce logic, construct appearances. But it cannot transmit the tremor, the breath, the inner conflict behind a sentence written by someone who has suffered, loved, waited, believed, doubted. Plausibility is only one layer. Truth, on the other hand, is what touches the soul. And only a human being can deliver that.

Epilogue:

In this age of algorithms, formulas, and simulations, the challenge will be twofold: for the writer, not to fall into the temptation of technical convenience; for the reader, to reject every work in which they find a lifeless formula. If we are to continue reading—and writing—good literature, we will have to resist the allure of the easy.

We must recover the tremor. The imperfection. The soul.

Only then will there be art.