Literature never dies with progress in science, says Chinese Nobel laureate on AI boom

By Anadolu staff

Literature will never die out with the progress of science, rather every scientific advance will give literature new wings, said Chinese Nobel laureate Mo Yan.

In a speech at an event on Monday where Mo and another Nobel Prize winner in literature Abdulrazak Gurnah had a dialogue, his remarks were regarded as a response to increasing public concern about whether AI (artificial intelligence) would take over the world of literature as technology continues to advance, Global Times newspaper reported.

Mo, 69, a novelist best known for his tales of rural life in China, became the first Chinese citizen to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012.

Literature, Mo observed, is a phenomenon that appears only after human progress has reached a very high stage in human history.

"When I started writing in the 1980s, I heard a lot of alarm bells ringing about literature that with the advent of television and the internet, the future of literature was at stake, and the fate of literature might be over," he went on to say.

"But it turns out that literature never dies with the progress of science, and every scientific advance gives literature new wings," he maintained.

He said he believes that the emergence of AI will not cause a "great crisis in literature, and the profession of writer will not end here."

"Mr. Gurnah and I should never lose our jobs in our lifetime," Mo said in a lighter vein.

Gurnah, a Tanzanian-born British novelist, arrived in China on March 5, his first visit to the country.