Crucial for literature to preserve human experiences

KUCHING: Literature must continue preserving human experiences, memories and emotions even as artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly becomes capable of producing sophisticated literary works.

Member of the Board of Directors for Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP)  Datuk Dr Jeniri Amir said the rapid development of AI had raised fundamental questions about creativity, authorship and literature’s purpose.

“AI can write about death, but it has never stood beside a grave. It can write about longing, but has never experienced waiting for someone,” he said.

He said this at the 2026 International Seminar on Southeast Asian Literature (SAKAT 2026) held at the Tun Abang Salahuddin Islamic Centre (PITAS), UNIMAS today (Sep21).

Jeniri said machines could generate poems, stories and metaphors within seconds, but speed and productivity should not be regarded as measures of literary value.

“Machines can produce words, but the ability to generate words does not necessarily mean they understand the meaning behind those words,” he said.

According to Jeniri, literature was rooted in human experiences, memories, love, loss, history and places, as well as people’s struggles to understand themselves.

He said writers should therefore avoid merely competing with machines in producing larger quantities of content, but instead focus on literature’s fundamental responsibilities.

“The question is not simply whether AI will replace writers, but what remains the responsibility of writers when machines can already produce language,” he said.

Jeniri said literature should continue remembering what society might otherwise forget, giving voice to marginalised communities and preserving languages facing increasing pressures.

He said this was particularly important in Southeast Asia, a diverse region comprising hundreds of millions of people, thousands of languages and varied cultural traditions.

The region’s literary heritage includes epics, legends, folk tales, poetry, novels, dramas and oral traditions that existed long before computers and modern technology.

However, he said these cultural treasures were now entering an era where language could be converted into data and literary works processed by algorithms.

“Stories become corpora, works become training material for algorithms, while algorithms increasingly determine which stories we see, which languages emerge and whose voices are heard,” he said.

Jeniri said the development of AI therefore required greater attention to ensuring Southeast Asian literary voices remained visible within an increasingly technology-driven environment.

The issue would be explored through the theme, “The Landscape of Southeast Asian Literature: Empirical Realities and Regional Voices in the Era of Artificial Intelligence”.

He said the discussion should ultimately focus not only on whether machines could write like humans, but whether human voices could remain meaningful.

“More importantly, in a world increasingly written by machines, can we ensure that the human voice, particularly the Southeast Asian voice, does not disappear among algorithms?” he said.