The Interview: David Szalay on why AI won't be able to replace authors

David Szalay is being shepherded between press engagements at Sydney Writers' Festival.

In 2025 the Hungarian-British author won the Booker Prize for Flesh, which follows teenager István as he moves beyond his working class beginnings in Hungary and eventually into the world of London's elite. The novel was described by Booker judge Roddy Doyle as "about living, and the strangeness of living" and by The Guardian as "about what is fundamentally unsayable, the ineffable things that sit at the centre of every life, hovering beyond the reach of language".

Szalay has since spent months articulating the unsayable and ineffable about the book in an endless press cycle of interviews.

We have a quick chat in the warm glow of the vanity lights bordering the dressing room mirrors in the bowels of Redfern's cavernous Carriageworks.

There is, inexplicably, an ironing board next to us. We ignore it but agree that I should probably acknowledge it was there when I eventually transcribe our interview.

How are you finding Australia?

Great. No, no I actually really like it. I didn't really know what to expect — I've never been here before. It's sort of more American than Europe and more European than America and maybe it is in a kind of sweet spot.

What's your favourite Australian novel?

I know it's not a recent book, it was published many years ago, but in the last six months, I read Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan. I thought that was brilliant. I also read, not that long ago, a book called Fly Away Peter by David Malouf. And I know, unfortunately, he recently died but I loved that book.

Are there any Hungarian writers in translation that you'd recommend?

Sure, I mean I myself can only read Hungarian translation really, my Hungarian is not really good enough to read it in the original novel.

I guess my favourite Hungarian novel is a novel called Fateless by Imre Kertész, who won the Nobel Prize about 20 years ago. It's a novel based on his personal experience of the Holocaust. Obviously we have, there are Holocaust novels, like ad infinitum, but this is a very, very great one. Because it's based on personal experience, it has an authority and it's kind of, it's quite funny. And he's allowed to do that because it is based on, he has the authority to be funny about it. It's not a comedy, it is a sad, crushing book ultimately, obviously, but it has comedy in it.

There's an ambient anxiety across the arts about AI and particularly about what its rise means for fiction. This week the debate was kicked further along by a Nobel Prize Winner speaking about using AI in preliminary research for her novel. How do you feel about the conversations underway about AI and writing?

Well, I was doing a radio interview a few months ago in London, it was actually a kind of live interview, and they sort of ambushed me. They'd asked some AI to write the first paragraph of a sequel to Flesh. I mean, to be fair to them, they did say, "is it OK if I read this out?" And I guess I could have said no. Luckily it was terrible. It was really awful. And it wasn't even a successful parody. It was just sort of generic AI trying to be literary. Flesh contains virtually no metaphors at all. This one paragraph contained two really laborious, clunky metaphors. It was a piece of writing that was grammatically correct… there was a bloke lying on a bed looking at a wall feeling sad or something. I didn't feel threatened by it. But, you know, it's improving all the time.

It goes back to physicality in a way — AI is not embodied. It does not know, will never know what it is like to be a living body. So it will always be pretending. It will always be this thing where it's trying to pretend to be a human living body writing about that. But it might get very, very, very good at pretending but that raises interesting questions about since we know it's pretend you know it does get interesting.

If I was writing genre fiction, I wouldn't be quite so relaxed, I don't think. I think it will be able to do that to a pretty high level.

It might come for the hockey smut.

Yes, exactly. It probably already has. But the thing is, even there, I don't think it would have the idea of doing hockey smut. That's very human to want to do hockey smut. You always need a human to want to do hockey smut, AI would never on its own think of doing hockey smut unless a human had already done it, you see, that's the key point.

We're here at Sydney Writers' Festival at a time when an author can't really afford to be a recluse or let their work speak for itself. Winning awards, as you have, obviously helps find readers but so does relentless promotion, whether it is celebrity book clubs — I noticed you did Dua Lipa's — or festivals like this one. What's your relationship to that side of it all? Do you enjoy it?

Yeah, well it makes a really nice counterpoint to sitting on your own in a room typing, which obviously is the other part of it. So I do quite enjoy sort of getting out and talking to people about the book and just sort of being a bit more social. I'm glad that that's not the whole job. I think most writers are people who are almost by definition quite happy to be sitting on their own in the room but that on its own would be probably a bit too isolating. So in moderation, like once every few years, the burst of going out into the world and talking to people is great.

Winning the Booker comes with a lot of attention and you know you're really in the spotlight where you're kind of relieved that you'd already begun writing the next book when you won?

Yes, I was definitely yeah. I'm glad that I'm not facing a blank sheet of paper. That would be quite hard. Even facing a half finished book is quite hard because suddenly it's like there's a feeling that the next book is going to be judged to a higher standard than it was before. And that's not really a very good frame of mind to be going about it. It's part of the reason why I haven't been able to work on it even when I have a week here or two weeks there in the last few months because I really need to put all of this behind me, put it all aside, forget about Flesh and just clear everything away. I've got quite a few things in Europe in the next few weeks and then I get a summer break and then there's another flurry of stuff in September, October. I'm hoping that it will end when somebody else wins the Booker Prize in November and everyone wants to talk to them. I can just slip away.

Capote had to write lying down, Steinbeck needed a specific pencil (Eberhard Faber Blackwing 6020). Do you need a set of certain conditions in order to write?

I don't have any weird quirks, unfortunately. Maybe I should make something up to answer this question. Most writers seem to answer their routine, how do they go about it, in the way that they get up early in the morning, work for a few hours and then stop. Again, this isn't really a weird quirk, this is totally normal and mainstream, but I just need a quiet, tranquil background for those hours, which is why the early morning is good.

You've written radio dramas before and many people enjoyed listening to Flesh as an audiobook, especially as a book with a lot of dialogue. What do you think of audiobooks?

I don't listen to them myself, but that's just a matter of habit. I haven't even listened to my own book as an audio book but I've heard very good things about it. I'm totally cool with people sort of experiencing my books or any books in that way. The actor brings something which you don't get really from reading it but it also takes something away because in any book there's an interpretation that's being put on it inevitably which means that the kind of width of possibility that you get from just reading the text is slightly narrowed by that.

I also wonder sometimes about how audiobooks dictate the pace. I struggle with the idea of not being able to pause throughout a book and process certain parts.

You're right. I mean, exactly, when I read I stop every 10 seconds and I will stare at the wall and things. So yeah, exactly that's something you can't do. I mean, it would be a bit weird to pause it and stare at a wall. It would be extremely distracting. Maybe if you're driving. I always think driving is the one situation where, obviously, you can't read a book… although with self-driving cars probably in a few years you can.

You've said that in Flesh you wanted to "write about life as a physical experience, about what it's like to be a living body in the world". I was thinking about this when reading a piece you wrote recently about the irresistible pull of the swimming pool. What in your own life makes you feel connected to your own physicality?

Nothing unusual. Actually the swimming pool thing is interesting because lying next to a swimming pool in the sun is quite a quiet and low-key physical experience but it's still a very physical experience. So a physical experience doesn't just need to mean some extravagantly and luridly physical experience, it can just be something quite quiet which is nevertheless very physical, like just lying next to a swimming pool and wondering whether to go for a swim. 

When I started writing [Flesh], I had just abandoned another book and so I kind of wanted to start with something that felt very concrete and I went for that in a literal way. But also because it is, just thinking about it I guess at that point, it was, it underlies everything. We are physical before anything else. We're not only physical, obviously, but it does sort of shape everything else quite decisively.

Before I'd read your novel Flesh I'd consumed none of the press about it so I was sort of surprised to find much of the coverage was about gender rather than class or something else. How do you feel about the book being bundled up in a bigger conversation about men and the masculinity crisis they're in?

It's not invalid to say the book's about masculinity in some way, it obviously is, but I don't like it being categorised like that. I don't like the suggestion that that's what it's about and we can leave the conversation there. I didn't think of it when I was writing it. I didn't think, "okay, no, I'm going to write a book about masculinity". I didn't think about it like that at all. 

I was very pleased that some of those reviews when it came out, explicitly said it would be a mistake to view this book as being even primarily about masculinity, but I guess once it won the Booker… you know, when a book wins the Booker Prize it needs ideally a sort of one word explanation of why it's important and masculinity was the thing that was chosen or that was hung around his neck at that point. I don't feel the book has been misinterpreted in that way, or sort of received, generally speaking, in a way that I don't like. Most people can see that the book is about more than masculinity.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.