Why can't AI write a great novel?

And does that mean that God exists?

Although AI can pass advanced maths exams, act as a doctor (with a decent bedside manner), and be put to work in law firms, it cannot yet write a decent novel or poem. Everything I have seen has been dross or highly derivative. It can be entertaining. But the idea that it will get to the level of Emily Dickinson or Charles Dickens seems implausible.

Why?

When I spoke to A.N. Wilson recently, he quoted Goethe who said the problem with Newton’s colour theory was that you could understand it even if you were colour blind. Goethe believed that this purely rational, enlightenment, approach was misguided. Colour was something that exists as we experienced it.

In many ways, current AI models are Newtonian. They can rationalise the world but they cannot apprehend it. They have no sense of the world, literally: they cannot smell, see, hear, touch, or taste it.

Great literature is experiential. Even the most cognitive poets, like George Herbert, rely on being able to make you feel what it is like to experience something. Reading Browning, another highly intellectual poet, we are constantly enacting sensations in response to his words.

And for many great authors, from Chaucer to Dickens, this is quite obvious. How can we read the great nineteenth century novels without feeling our skin crawl, laughing in happy recognition, tsk-ing, gasping, and exhaling as we see what they see, sense what they sense?

From the “The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne” of Chuacer to the “long fields of barely and of rye” in Tennyson, from the Beowulf dragon “That warden of gold/ o’er the ground went seeking” to the opening of The Eve of St Agnes with “the hare limped trembling through the frozen grass”, we rely on knowing these things about the world to make sense of the lines. We must have some sense of crops and gold and frozen grass.