A view from Brussels: Literacy enters an 'era of suspicion'

A scandal is shaking the literary world: the author of a book short-listed for some of the most prestigious literary prizes is accused of having substantively used artificial intelligence to write it. 

The scandal comes as the AI community and society at large are seized by concerns about cybersecurity and agentic AI and debating whether leading AI frontier labs should pace their pursuit of technological development. 

AI is used in cinema, too, sometimes in disguise, yet it has not merely triggered the same types of reaction. When it comes to the written word, the duplicity appears intolerable. 

There is a dizzying dichotomy playing out in this scandal that transcends both the extreme and the simple: the vertiginous testing of how far we can — or ought to — take technology and the regressive nature of a hand putting pen to paper as mankind has done for millenniums.

French journalist Augustin Trapenard calls this the "era of suspicion." Suspicion that AI could shake our very humanity and betray our emotional intelligence.

We need suspicion if it means exercising critical judgment, and even more so in an era of profound mis- and dis-information, if it means questioning the nature of the empowerment we are giving to humans and to technology, their own creation. 

But what might resorting to suspicion say about us? What might it trigger in our societies? Who will win if suspicion becomes our compass? What would it say about our own ability or willingness to police ourselves in objective ways? History is full of cautionary tales.

In our space we talk a lot about guardrails. They can be laws, processes, tools, business rationales, technological considerations or ethical ones.

The fundamental question that the literary world is challenging us with is whether any of these guardrails actually work for it, when our emotions and intellectual integrity are at stake. 

The problem is: we may have been duped, but what if the emotion was genuine nonetheless?