For a contemporary writer, the real crisis is not really AI, it is that readers are giving up their right to read and think, said Malaysian writer Li Zishu at a recent forum about Literary Trends in the Age of AI at Beijing Normal University.

Li said that she came across several posts on Xiaohongshu, or Red-Note, a social media platform, about her best-selling novel Liu Su Di (Worldly Land). To her surprise, she found that neither had she written some excerpts in those posts nor did they appear in her book.

"When sharing their reading insights online, those bloggers are surprisingly relying on artificial intelligence to write for them. What's troubling is that they did not even notice that some of the quotes they were posting are not from the book at all."

The forum, a key event of the 31st Beijing International Book Fair in June, was held against the backdrop of the fast advancing artificial intelligence, which has urged many people to ask whether writers will be replaced by AI in the future.

Writers attending the forum, however, shared a unified stance: even as AI becomes more powerful, the role of the writer remains irreplaceable.

Li spoke about how working on a new novel became, for her, a symbolic act of resistance — a creative "war" she wages against artificial intelligence.

In the novel, she introduces an elderly woman whose husband has recently passed away. Initially, Li envisioned a plot where the husband is "revived" using AI technology to comfort the grieving widow. However, she soon realized that the old lady might desire a better "lover" than her late husband. This realization shifted the narrative. Li changed the storyline to involve a fraudulent scheme where a ring uses AI to create perfect lovers for scams. Later, Li restructured it again to turn it into a rivalry: a female novelist and AI compete to craft the ideal lover for the same woman.

"In writing this novel, I — as an author — am essentially declaring war on AI, challenging to see which of us can design an artificial lover that truly lives in the heart of a real woman," she said.

Although AI has beaten humans in chess, "literary writing is, after all, not chess — not a step-by-step process. The dimensions of the human heart, its complexity, far surpass that of a chess game," she said.

Chinese writer Liang Hong shared a similar sentiment, saying the rise of AI actually pushed her to work harder on her writing.

At the beginning of the year, when AI tool DeepSeek ignited a craze as it seems to be able to write whatever users order, from ancient poetry to modern fiction, Liang said she, however, felt a strong sense of rebellion.

"All of a sudden, I felt a compelling need to write with excellence and portray people with depth and authenticity," she said.

At that time, she was working on portraying a person and all of a sudden, she felt a closer and more profound spiritual bond with the individual.

"Why did I react so strongly, feeling the urge to work harder at writing and to portray a living, breathing person?" she asked herself.

"It was because I believed that while technologies like DeepSeek or ChatGPT might be able to swiftly sift through vast amounts of data to create something, the essence of living individuals and a dynamic society is organic and ever-changing. This complexity demands thoughtful reflection and insight that only humans can provide."

She borrowed German philosopher Walter Benjamin's concept of "aura", which, she explained, emerges in the contemplative encounter between human and object — a reciprocal gaze that creates an ephemeral atmosphere, crystallizes a mode of being, creating a fleeting but meaningful presence.

"AI is great for research," she acknowledged, "but it can't replace the human ability to truly see — to gaze at a speck of dust, a plant, or a patch of sunlight — and infuse it with the kind of presence only literature can create.

"In this sense, as a writer in the AI era, I don't feel an overwhelming sense of crisis," she said.

"The trend of literature in the AI era is precisely about literature itself."

Just as Nobel Prize laureate Mo Yan once said, every scientific advancement is an opportunity for literature to renew itself. Contemporary writers are at such a critical juncture, where they need to rekindle their inspiration, reexamine society, and reassess the characteristics of human nature and reading habits in the context of AI, as well as the overall state of literature, she said.

"I feel a desire to challenge myself, to push the limits of my spirit and explore my relationship with society," Liang said.

For Chinese poet Ouyang Jianghe, it is better to examine the impact of AI on literature within a deeper and broader framework of literary, intellectual, and historical context, rather than merely at the superficial level of human-machine interaction.

"It's too early to call this a 'paradigm shift'," he said.

Ouyang examined the several paradigm shifts in history, including Dante's The Divine Comedy, which revolutionized literature by establishing Italian, rather than Latin, as the preferred language for writing. This shift made literature more accessible and played a crucial role in unifying and elevating the Italian language and identity.

Even if AI were to trigger a new paradigm shift, Ouyang said, it is debatable whether it could give rise to truly great writers, since after Dante, there was no masterpiece as great as The Divine Comedy.

"We must acknowledge that AI is incredibly powerful. But the challenge for literature isn't about competing with something so advanced; it's about confronting the self. You may not be as intelligent as it is, but literature often springs from something relatively slow, a little foolish, and far from all-knowing. We don't need to know everything," he said.

Even if AI knows everything and can simulate human emotions and feelings, it still "lives" the secondhand life based on human's "firsthand" experience, said Chinese writer Qiao Ye.

The underlying logic and fundamental confidence in human writing is human beings' limited infinity, which AI does not own, Qiao Ye said.

Wang Nan, professor from the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at Beijing Normal University, interpreted the confidence in human writing by examining that fundamental shift of Western art and literature that occurred alongside industrial revolutions since the 18th century.

At the heart of this shift is confidence in humanity, she said. The purpose of art has gradually transitioned from imitating timeless beauty and expressing universal truths to conveying personal emotions and capturing fleeting moments.

Now that AI can simulate and copy human feelings, instinct, and emotions with algorithm, even creating better work, what will become of the rationality, imagination, creativity, and even free will that humanity possesses?

Quoting Aristotle, Wang answered that, "The duty of a poet is not to depict what has already happened, but to portray what could happen. Imagining a future and using it to inspire or alert people in reality is precisely the responsibility of writers or literary critics."

Therefore, depicting the many possibilities of a not-too-distant future through the full force of human creativity is a mission contemporary literature should not shy away from, Wang said.