Mariana Enríquez: Algorithms and AI are good breeding ground for literature

Argentine author and journalist Mariana Enriquez, known for her horror novels that produce sharp social criticism, believes that "the algorithm, artificial intelligence, the telephone and social media" are beneficial to literature and art – much more so than the policies of certain governments.

Enriquez, 51, is one of the best-known voices in gothic fiction. Her award-winning books have been translated into many languages. They often address social issues such as poverty, inequality and gender violence.

"What's common around the world isn't so much the reactionary shift of governments but rather the algorithm, artificial intelligence, the telephone, and social media," said the writer in an interview in Paris.

"That's much more closely related to literature and the narration of everyday life, paranoia, cruelty and madness, than to governments," Enriquez added, recalling that art in general speaks to "social anxieties and fears."

"People are far from governments and very close to the paranoid and inhumane discourse of social media," says Enriquez, who is promoting the French translation of her book A Sunny Place for Shady People, a collection of 12 stories.

Several of these are to be turned into a Netflix miniseries directed by Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín.

The writer insists on the literal meaning of inhuman, as a system of digital networks where much of the discourse is not made by people, but by robots.

Nowadays, she says, “when you read the news or see images, you can’t tell if that image represents reality or not, if it's fake news, if it's a real face or one modified by artificial intelligence, you don't know if you're talking to a person or a robot…”

"This is the first generation of human beings to live with this type of robot," she warns. "It's clearly terrifying."

‘One more frustration’

When asked about her country, where President Javier Milei is facing a political crisis after slashing inflation and achieving a historic fiscal surplus at the cost of devaluing the peso and eliminating subsidies, the author responds that the situation is "very bad."

In her opinion, after almost two years in office, his policy is "a failure."

But "that's not good news ... Argentina needs to improve and have a good government to move it forward and one more failure is one more frustration, one more despair."

"I don't think Milei is a weirdo," she says. "He's part of a process of desperation among people in Argentina who can't find political solutions to the endless economic and social problems and have opted for a crazy solution."

Could Milei, with a chainsaw in hand and who considers his dogs like his “four-legged children,” become one the characters in her stories?

“No”, she responds. “No political figures are in my stories, what is depicted are the social situations that certain policies provoke but I have never used any of them."

"And the truth is, he's not the first very striking president in the country, there are quite a few... They're not figures that appeal to me in literary terms," she adds.

Winner of the José Donoso Ibero-American Literature Prize in 2024, Enriquez uses horror fiction to capture a reality which, according to her, has "many dimensions."