AI Can Rewrite Classic Novels — But Should It?

An essay on the tech forum LessWrong asks a strange but revealing question: could a powerful AI rewrite William Faulkner's 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury and make it genuinely better? The book is notoriously hard to read — its first chapter is narrated by a man with a mental disability, and memories blur into the present. An AI, the author admits, could easily smooth all that out. Most first-time readers would probably prefer the clearer version. So yes, technically, the machine wins.

But then comes the twist. The author argues that what makes a great novel valuable isn't that it's the clearest way to tell a story. It's a window into the artist's mind — a specific person from a specific time and place. Change a single word and you've broken that link. You'd have a lovely modern reimagining of a childhood home, not the actual childhood home. By that logic, no intelligence, human or machine, can ever make the book better — and AI can't kill human expression after all.

Then the author flips again. Maybe all that 'soul' talk is overblown. Editors already change writers' words — that's literally their job. Faulkner borrowed heavily from other writers, including James Joyce. And plenty of books nobody reads or wants to read are supposedly full of soul. So maybe the real question isn't whether AI can improve a novel, but whether we're protecting books because they're sacred, or just because they're ours.

This sounds abstract, but it lands somewhere very practical. AI is already writing ad copy, editing news, summarizing books, and drafting novels. The argument isn't really about Faulkner. It's about what we want to keep human — and whether we'd rather have writing that's easy and pleasant, or writing that's difficult and unmistakably someone's own.