this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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If the issue is that you think that an AI can never extrapolate beyond what humans have already written, then there's no need to even say "conversation" or worry about AI replacing human artists. If the AI isn't any good, it's not going to replace people who are, any more so than the multitude of unoriginal human authors have.
(I think that the inability to extrapolate is not an inherent limitation of AI, and I except that AI will actually be more capable of creating something original than humans are, but that's beside the point here.)
However, it sounds to me like Sanderson doesn't agree with you - he's worried that AI will be able to write things that readers will enjoy at least as much as the best human writing. The "conversation" that he's talking about is within his own mind, and his writing is a product of it rather than a representation of it. He's asking readers to respect the value of that internal conversation, but my point is that even if I grant that Sanderson's experience of writing has value, that value is inaccessible to anyone but him to the extent that it is more than the words on paper.
This is the problem that you're not understanding. You are attempting to remove the artist from the artwork and not understanding that one fundamentally feeds into the other. Brandon's internal journey from becoming a person who wants to write a novel to the person who writes Sanderson novels isn't some abstract thing that only he gets to appreciate. It's there, in his work. You can even see the change in his published works as his style and approach evolved over time.
You could craft an LLM to make the mountain of mediocre stuff that gets churned out, but the cost would be never having a great work ever again. No one would bother publishing if they couldn't get above the skill threshold that LLMs set, which would make the herculean effort that it already takes to write a novel to something positively sisyphean. And it's the job of making the whole novel that makes people capable of making the next great work.
And no, a prompt maker wouldn't be able to create a great work, since it's the marriage between your skill with words and prose with theme and narrative that makes something great. Since the prompt maker has no control over one, he could never master the other, nor ever hope to bring them together.