When I look at the world over the last five to ten years, I see a battleground. Not an acknowledged one, but an unacknowledged one. A battleground between those who want to shape the world in their image, and those who are just doing their best to live in it. Most people in that second group are simply trying to pay their bills, raise their children, trust their governments, and be good citizens as much as possible. Some of them see what’s happening and worry about it, try to change it, feel it’s a slightly unfair fight. Some find themselves giving up each day. Others continue as best they can.
On the other side, those who want to take over the world, well, I’m tempted to say this is their time. They’ve got the world round to a place where it now works best for them. They avoid paying taxes. They’re in alignment with all kinds of power structures, the money people, the power people, the information people, the corporation people. Everywhere you look, they seem to have us. By our phones, our streaming platforms, the cinema, the water we drink almost. Never in the history of the human race has the world been so unified in a way that makes it easier for big forces to work on most of the whole world at roughly the same time.
And yet, I need to stress that while it appears to be their time, I still think that is an illusion. It is not an eternal, unalterable fact that they have taken over the world. Not yet. It is not written forever in stone. Because the most essential power structure of all still eludes them, and that is human consciousness.
We can seem to be swayed, seduced, even enchained by screens and scrolling and streaming and debt, but I wouldn’t count on it forever. There is a part of us that is unreachable. A part that is fed by something no amount of spin and no amount of addiction can quite reach. It is finally the saving grace of the human race.
It’s like asking whether we can conquer the sun, whether we can conquer all the light of the stars. Not really.
They have tried before. We’ve seen human history. Various revolutions, various programmes, various attempts to shape the human being into one kind of thing or another. Sometimes it works for a thousand years, sometimes two or three or four thousand years. And then it breaks down. It’s like asking whether we can conquer the sun, whether we can conquer all the light of the stars. Not really.
That part of us, that core, whatever you want to call it, I don’t dare give it a name, no word in the language can crystallise it, soul doesn’t do it, spirit doesn’t do it, but that is where, at its highest and at its best, the stories come from. That’s where the myths, the enduring legends, come from. Writers are at their best not when they’re writing the most polished prose in the world. They’re at their best when they speak from, or are reached by, or mysteriously charged by, that place. It’s a profound calculus.
When writers do their best work, it does not come from them. It comes through them. It does not come from their brains, or their education, their smartness, or cleverness. In fact, all of that gets in the way. It comes through their innocence, their vulnerability, truth, wisdom, their openness, the surprise of their receptivity to something bigger than them. The greatest artist is the one who is able to bottle that lightning in such a way that you get a sense of the original in its purest form. You feel it’s not Shakespeare that did it. You feel it’s not Flaubert. You feel it’s not Achebe. You feel like they were just there when that particular lightning struck, and they were generous and open enough to bottle it with the highest level of their humanity and literary skills.
This is exactly where AI falls down, and no one seems to mention this. AI can write you a story in the style of Chekhov. AI can write in the style of Tolstoy. AI can do Finnegans Wake better than Joyce, and can do it in 20 minutes rather than 17 years. And I say, good! Because that was never our only job. Our job was much deeper, much humbler than that.
To touch those things, you need to be alive. You need to suffer. You need to love. You need to experience hunger.
AI cannot read the spirit of the times. AI cannot catch lightning. AI cannot be taken over by some strange story that is electrified by a profound terror hanging over the human race, our deepest fears, our traumas, our hopes, our nightmares, our ancient longings. AI knows nothing about that. To touch those things, you need to be alive. You need to suffer. You need to love. You need to experience hunger. You need to have suffered injustice, rejection, childhood trauma. You need to be twisted and broken, on the edge of breakdown, on the edge of disintegration. And out of all that comes something fractured and strange, like a message in a bottle sent not from the past but from the future, as a coded warning.
AI can’t go there. AI is a great imitator and a great combiner of what already exists. Brilliant, clever, absolutely. But this has got to be a killer to the writer’s ego, and I say about bloody time. That was never our main job.
One of the writer’s duties, and I’ve felt this for a long time, is to create new myths for their times. We lose touch with the old ones, take them for granted, relegate them to children’s stories, these great profound things that will speak to us until the end of time. So the writer must give new inflection to the mythic, to the guides of our spirit.
My new novel, Waking the Warriors, is an encoded book, and the code starts already with the title. I wrote it under a mysterious, unacknowledged, unstated cloud of censorship. That was the pressure out of which the story emerged. I was trying to say, indirectly, things I felt I could not say directly. And that works beautifully for fiction. If you feel you can’t speak the thing you really need to say, and you have to say it indirectly, that’s where storytelling thrives. This is my terrain. I like it when it’s indirect.
What worries me about AI, though, is not what it can do, but what it might strip from us. We might find ourselves stripped of difficulty, which is one of the worst things that can be done to a human being. If the extraordinary striving it took Joyce to write what he wrote, his failing eyesight, the many years, his vast reading, gets taken from us because a machine can do it in 20 minutes, then we lose something essential. We might be stripped of memories, of the deep use of our intelligence, of our personal skills, of the very need to be human. We might be str of our will. We need difficulty to keep growing, keep striving. Nothing can be worse for us than to make art easy, to make life too easy. We could perish of having nothing to strive for. Isn’t that how some civilisations declined?
We might get cornered in our humanity. And I think that’s when we’ll come awake.
There’s a phrase in Axël by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, where a character says, “as for living, our servants can do that for us”. We’re now entering the time where we can say, “as for living, our computers can do that for us”. We might get cornered in our humanity. And I think that’s when we’ll come awake. Because we’ll start to ask the question, what have we done to ourselves? What does life really mean?
Already, actually, it’s happening. The younger generation is moving away from curated easy stuff. They’re beginning to want handwritten things again, layered experiences, what you can touch and hold. You can’t be sure what we will choose to do when we’ve been driven to the very edge of our humanity.
The blurring of truth and fiction that’s happening right now is one of the most deliberate processes at work. When truth is taken away, what’s left is whatever can be made up by people who can disseminate it the widest. That might take the form of story, even the form of fake myth. But when we receive it, our minds are always a little suspicious, because we know what it’s serving. It never makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. It never gives that inward shiver of unspeakable truth, of unexpected discovery. And what’s happened is the opposite of what they expected. They thought we’d get so confused we wouldn’t know where to turn. Instead, it’s recharged our secret antennae to the real thing.
When we encounter a true story, a true myth, it no longer has to be something you can verify. It hits your soul when you least expect it. You might read something and it does nothing to you, and then a year later it pops up in your mind and helps you look at a situation in a completely different light. It works very secretly. It works deeper than intelligence.
This conversation took place on 9 June 2026 and has been edited lightly for clarity and flow.
Ben Okri’s new book, Waking the Warriors, is available now.
