Reading the 2026 longlist this week for the Bridport First Novel competition (one of the most prestigious writing prizes that helped launch the careers of authors like Kate Atkinson, Kit de Waal and Gail Honeyman) is a timely corrective to the concern about fiction produced by AI and the threat it might pose to real fiction. Each of the twenty novels on the longlist are characterised by emotional complexity and intellectual curiosity that make for the kind of nuanced writing I don’t believe AI can replicate. Would you opt to read fiction manufactured by AI when you could invest in a work of fiction written by a sentient human being?