Yes. The more interesting question is what that actually means.
Early AI Text Generation
The earliest experiments predate the current generation of large language models by decades (Here’s a more in depth look at the history of Human/AI collaboration in creating books) . In the 1980s, programs like RACTER generated text that was assembled into a book — The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed — though the “writing” was closer to procedural text generation than anything resembling narrative authorship. Interesting as a historical artifact. Not a novel in any meaningful sense.
Neural Network Fiction Experiments
The 2010s saw a wave of NaNoWriMo experiments where researchers fed early neural networks on fiction corpora and generated novel-length text. The output was often surreal and sometimes fascinating, but it was not coherent narrative. The machine was pattern-matching, not storytelling.
The Transformer Revolution
The frontier shifted with Transformer-based large language models — the architecture underlying GPT, Claude, and their contemporaries. These models can sustain narrative coherence across longer passages, generate dialogue, maintain character consistency within a context window, and respond to creative direction in ways that earlier systems couldn’t.
The First Modern AI-Cowritten Novels
The first serious collaboration between a human author and a modern Transformer-based AI to produce a novel-length work happened earlier than most people realize — in the pre-public beta period of tools like Sudowrite, which was built on early GPT models before the technology was widely available. Those early experiments produced books that look, from the outside, like novels. Whether they are novels — whether the AI “wrote” them in any meaningful sense, or whether a human director assembled them using AI as instrument — is the question worth sitting with.
What AI has produced, with human collaboration, is a genuinely new kind of object. Not exactly a human-written novel. Not exactly a generated text. Something in between, whose creative and legal status we’re still figuring out.
This article is part of the AI & The Novel series on Indignified.com. All articles reflect the author’s research and perspective and do not constitute legal or financial advice.