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Artificial Intelligence (AI) has advanced at a breathtaking pace, transforming the landscape of work, industry, and innovation. Its capacity to complement, enhance, or even replace human labor is expanding rapidly, driving disruption across sectors. As AI continues to evolve—and the possibility of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) looms—its influence may extend into domains traditionally defined by human creativity, fundamentally reshaping how we create, produce, and imagine.
Today, when someone wants to read, they can purchase books, borrow them, or download them to a mobile device. In every case, they’re selecting from a vast, but finite, collection of books that have already been written. While no single person could ever consume the full supply, each reader must still navigate a mismatch between their unique tastes and the fixed content available. The imperfections in that match may, paradoxically, be part of the magic of reading.
But now imagine a future that is perhaps only a few years away. A person wants to read a book and simply asks an AI to create one—from scratch. The process is interactive. The reader can shape the narrative, tone, and themes, while the AI, drawing on an intimate understanding of that individual’s preferences, produces a perfectly customized experience. This is the dawn of “books-on-demand.” That seismic shift could redefine storytelling and disrupt the entire literary ecosystem.
The building blocks for a “books-on-demand” future are already present. One can feed AI book ideas or use AI to generate book ideas. One can even ask AI to generate book ideas for entirely new genres. Two examples:
However, simply asking AI today to then write the books based on the ideas isn’t very effective. One can wind up with a lot of blank pages, placeholders, and other content serving as “filler.” Nevertheless, one can prompt one’s way into creating a book.
For purposes of this blog, I gave AI an idea for a short story. I then asked it to create an outline and then map that outline to the book’s chapters. Afterward, I asked it to write each chapter and describe each new character as he or she was introduced. Finally, I asked AI to generate a title.
Below is a piece of the outline:
Below is the opening to Chapter 1:
An example of character development is below:
AI titled the book, “Whispers of Mars.” That book concluded:
Somewhere beneath the crust, in the hollow chambers of the world, the thing-that-was-awake turns once more in its dreaming.
It is not bound now.
It is held.
Not by force.
But by memory.
And memory is the oldest bond of all.
Once AGI emerges, numerous paths will be laid open for literature in particular, and the arts in general. Three possible paths: (1) Human work could become a luxury with enhanced cultural value. (2) Co-creation between human and AI/AGI could become the norm. (3) AGI-generated work could become so emotionally resonant, surprising, and versatile that it would supplant most human work.
Co-creation may prove to be the most novel and deeply enriching path forward. Imagine a lifelong companion-storyteller, one that evolves with the reader, adjusting its voice, themes, and moral complexity as the reader matures. It remembers emotional responses, recalls shared narrative memories, and builds upon them across new stories. This dynamic continuity could dissolve the boundary between literature and relationship, transforming storytelling into a living mirror of the self—part archive, part oracle, part confidant. Perhaps literature-as-relationship might reverse the decline in reading that has been ongoing over the past decade.
As creativity becomes increasingly entangled with machines, we’ll be forced to decide what we actually value: efficiency or expression, scale or soul, optimization or originality. The arrival of AGI won’t end human creativity. It will challenge humanity to define it more sharply, defend it more deliberately, and perhaps rediscover why it matters in the first place.
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