Let me begin with a story.

A few weeks ago, I submitted an essay to a well-known American publication. The piece explored the digital present — more specifically, the uneasy future in which human creativity may become as unthinkable without machine assistance as, say, sneaker production without global supply chains. The editor’s initial response was warm. She even called the text “organic.”

A few days later, the rejection arrived. The reason? “We do not publish texts created with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence.”

Suddenly, my once-“organic” essay had turned into something else entirely — an hesyhast sermon whispered in the high Byzantine gloom by a heretic mistaken for a monk. As if I had uttered an unclean prayer before the High Priests of Sanctity, expecting mercy. Whatever stage I had hoped to reach dissolved on the spot. Curtain. Silence.

Let me be absolutely clear. I do not use AI to write my texts. What AI does for me is help with translation and editing — a high-tech prosthesis, yes, but one that lets my voice emerge across the linguistic membrane I could never breach alone.

But to truly understand the force of that silence, one must begin much earlier — long before ChatGPT, before AI, before the digital shift that now seems to threaten every cultural assumption we once held dear.

You see, I write in a language that many readers of this piece — at least those encountering it in English — may never even have heard of: Bulgarian. It is the only language in which I can truly think, feel, and write. Unfortunately, its near-total disconnection from the dominant intellectual and cultural streams of our time turns any act of authorship into a causa perduta. No matter how brilliant, deep, or simply engaging one’s writing may be, unless it is translated into one of the globally privileged tongues — or let’s be blunt, into English — it has about the same chance of being recognized as the proverbial snowball in hell.

What remains is the tight, often hostile circle of the local audience, provincial by reflex, defensive by instinct. It’s the cage I’ve lived in for the last twenty-five years. I would likely have died in it, too — were it not for a sudden and improbable deus ex machina: artificial intelligence, of all things.

Artificial intelligence did not kill the author. Nor could it — because the author, at least outside the cultural capitals of the West, was never truly born.

Of course, there have always been people who wrote out there. Who wrestled with language, suffered for clarity, chipped away at the dark in hope of form. But not blessed with the privilege of being called “authors.” Not beyond the stagnant puddles of their forever-marginalized cultures. To them fell only the agony and the sweat. Everything else — the visibility, the access, the legitimacy — was reserved for the others: the chosen.

Yes, LLMs destabilize something. But not what many Western writers believe. They shake loose not the essence of writing itself, but the illusion of exclusivity — the unspoken, largely invisible monopoly on authorship held by dominant languages, institutions, and markets. For those of us who have written in silence for decades, AI is not an existential threat. It is a mirror. For the first time, it reflects — with brutal clarity — just how little authorship has ever protected us.

Viewed from a certain angle, the entire history of human culture and technology is little more than a long string of hopeless wars — failed attempts to repel the arrival of some threatening new force. From Plato’s Phaedrus, where writing itself was denounced as a memory-destroying innovation, to today’s panic over synthetic minds displacing us from the throne of intelligent life — the shape remains the same.

One of these battles, though, stands out in collective memory with mythic force: the struggle of the Luddites, led by the almost certainly fictional Ned Ludd, against the machines of the Industrial Revolution.

So potent is this symbol that the word “Luddite” alone suffices to discredit any resistance to technological change. To be called one is to be dismissed as a stubborn fool, immune to reason — a figure of ridicule, if not pity.

That is, until you look more closely. Until you imagine it from inside the dust-choked lungs of those who lived it — powerless, stripped of their trade, watching the monstrous iron limbs of progress annihilate their last hope of dignity.

It’s easy to be wise when you lie on the shoulders of 200 years of hindsight. It’s something else entirely to face the same kind of upheaval — only this time, dressed in digital skin.

What we’re living through now bears such a chilling resemblance to that earlier trauma that it becomes almost absurd how little we seem to have learned. And the irony is biting: this time, the crusade against the new isn’t led by displaced weavers or starving miners. It’s led by our cultural elite — the intellectual priesthood, those who speak most fluently in the dialect of progress, suddenly straining to slam the gates shut behind them.

Their resistance is no less emotional, no less self-preserving. Because when the machines come not for your hands, but for your thoughts, your tone, your cadence — the very fabric of your inner voice — what remains of the sanctity of authorship? Of individuality? Of worth?

And yet, just like the Luddites’ war, this one is doomed. Not because the fear is baseless — far from it — but because the tide is too strong. History offers no precedent for re-bottling this kind of genie. Once the bottle opens, it stays open.

Whether this ironclad pattern reflects some deep quirk of our species or wider structural laws of the world we live in is unclear — and perhaps beside the point. What matters is this: every attempt to restrain or reverse the march of the new is doomed to fail, and few rational minds would seriously dispute the inevitability of that truth.

And yet, each time a frightening novelty appears, our collective behavior plays out along the same old lines — echoing Churchill’s dry wisdom. We always do the right thing — but only after we’ve exhausted all possible alternatives.

Must we now form some kind of Machine-McCarthy committees, with solemn public oaths that “this content is 100% free from AI collaboration” — punishable by erasure the moment it’s revealed the pledge was false?

And really, how much does it matter how a text was created, when every cell of our critical mind, our refined sensibility and cultural instinct screams in unison: “This is a damn good piece of writing!”?

Isn’t it time we began to recognize — even if gradually — that the war against machine intelligence, at least in this relatively narrow domain of writing thoughtful, meaningful stories, is just as pointless, misguided, and doomed to fail as every other war ever waged against technological innovation?

And isn’t it also time we stopped dismissing as second-rate every text shadowed by the suspicion of machine involvement — no matter how much secret delight we might feel while reading it?

The real crime is not the use of machines. It is the silent, unacknowledged preservation of exclusion — the continued denial of literary legitimacy to voices that have been buried for decades by the structure of global culture itself.

Before you stands, more bowed than upright, one of the countless representatives of that never-born majority. I, Zlatko Enev, have written for twenty-five years in silence and impotent rage. Not poetic silence. Literal silence.

I live in Berlin, but my literary voice was born and shaped in a language with a confiscated passport. My novels, essays, and books have been published — officially, sometimes even recognised — but only in Bulgaria. For a quarter of a century I watched, powerless, as Western authorship grew ever smoother, more networked, more legible. And deep down, I always knew that no effort or brilliance would ever help my voice breach the linguistic membrane. I was unknown not because I hadn’t poured everything I had into my sentences — not because I hadn’t written with the blood of unhealed veins — but because I wrote in a language the global literary market has never had, and maybe never will have, ears for.

It’s true that something is ending. But it’s not the author. What watches its own demise in terror now is the machine of selection and admission — the one that monopolised authorship for centuries. In the West, being an author has long meant being born into the “right” language and the “right” literary ecology. We, who write in peripheral tongues — outside the tightly guarded perimeter of English, French, or Spanish — were never invited to the table. LLMs do not de-authorise us, simply because we were never authorised to begin with.

That is what these laments about la muerte anunciada fail to see — and maybe cannot see. For those who think this way, authorship has always been real, guaranteed, legally defensible. Its collapse is shocking, no matter how ironically or philosophically one tries to receive it. But for me, its absence has always been the only reality.

That’s why I can say: AI is not killing the author. It is exposing the fantasy. And, paradoxically, it is giving voice to people like us. People who never had one. Not once.

My belief in authorship was never theoretical. It was always an act of survival — and still is. I’m not afraid of the death of the author. I only ask that, if we are truly going to bury him, the eulogy not be given by someone who never had to write as a matter of life and death.

Because for some of us, authorship has never meant privilege. It has meant pain — a desperate cry into the void, a refusal to lower our gaze before the herd of lowered horns that has always been our most visible audience.

This author is not dead.

They were simply never born.