The Unbearable Lightness Of Writing In The Postdigital Era

This article explores the tension between mainstream media discourses and emerging literary practices involving generative AI in Sweden. As literature increasingly engages with the postdigital condition, where human–machine co-authorship becomes both technically feasible and aesthetically meaningful, a gap is emerging between the traditional, print-based literary landscape and experimental efforts to integrate AI into creative writing. To investigate this discrepancy, the article compares Swedish media reactions following the release of ChatGPT-3 in 2022 with close readings of two recent Swedish literary works: Ammaseus horisont (2020), an AI-generated poetry collection, and Mod och motstånd i en föränderlig värld (2023), a volume of AI-written short stories. The study adopts a twofold methodological approach, combining critical discourse analysis of media coverage with literary analysis of selected aspects of the works. Findings indicate that the primary challenge is not the automation of literary writing, but rather the question of how human–machine collaboration can be meaningfully shaped, interpreted, and valued. Both literary projects demonstrate that human intention, genre conventions, and aesthetic judgment remain integral to AI-assisted literary production. Rather than replacing human authorship, generative AI models create new forms of distributed agency that demand critical engagement, both in terms of process and product. This study contributes to the expanding field of postdigital literary studies by arguing that authorship in the age of AI should not be viewed as a loss of control, but rather as a redistribution of creative labor and literary decision-making.