A Sociological Inquiry into Literature in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

This article explores literature in the age of artificial intelligence as a site where technology, power, and human imagination converge and quietly collide. It advances a sociological inquiry into how algorithmic systems reshape authorship, authority, and the production of meaning. Artificial intelligence is not treated merely as a tool but as a structural actor within the literary field, reconfiguring symbolic capital, institutional hierarchies, and the boundaries between creator and creation. Drawing on theories of cultural production and social systems, the study examines how machine learning models alter narrative form, aesthetic evaluation, and the circulation of texts. It argues that literature is entering a phase in which authorship becomes distributed, creativity hybridized, and interpretation increasingly mediated by computational infrastructures. Beneath the surface of efficiency and innovation lies a deeper transformation of epistemic power. Who speaks when a text is generated by an algorithm trained on collective memory. Who owns imagination when data becomes the raw material of culture. The article situates these questions within broader trajectories of digital modernity, considering both emancipatory potentials and new regimes of control. It proposes that literature remains a critical arena for negotiating human agency in technologically saturated societies. Rather than announcing the end of the human author, the analysis suggests a redefinition of literary subjectivity, one that reflects shifting configurations of knowledge, authority, and social legitimacy. In this emerging epoch, literature becomes a diagnostic instrument of civilizational change, revealing not only what we create with machines, but what we are becoming through them.