Starlight Girl has the feel of an AI-written parable. It lacks the true depth of the human experience. It has a repeating, monotonous pattern of moral lessons presented by a wise street artist to a 12-year-old girl, Nadja, whose past is tragically marred by war.

Yet, all throughout literature, we can find similar writings which present moral lessons in simple and shallow terms of merely light engagement with the friction of life. Therefore, I do see a place for this little book. I believe it has limited marketability, but its tiny niche is arguably significant — that of a little book to be read to little children by their parents or keepers, a nighttime read while they lie on their pillows.

Personally, I have nothing against AI-generated literature. And if this really is written by a real person, start to finish, I’m enthusiastically inclined to say it is a fine piece of writing which represents an ageless moral that will always be relevant in a world torn by loneliness and empty hearts wandering through life, wondering why they cannot be happy when they seem to have everything that should make them so. Indeed, as the story suggests, life really is divided between shadows and light, and if children are taught to search for the light, they will definitely have a better chance at finding it.

I foresee a world in which no “thought” or writing can be trusted to be authentically produced by a human being with a soul. I’m already seeing the total lack of humanity in book reviews. (Note: this book review was not AI-generated.) I think the world of literature must establish new rules, and one of those rules will be to require all writers of anything (including the romantic writers of love letters and poems to their lovers) to state whether their work is AI-generated or not. Is it or isn’t it? And I think readers are soon going to tire of anything that smacks of AI. AI, as I already suggested, has no soul. And without a soul, a novel or any work of literature is merely a hollow body of acrobatic words without real connection to experience.

Once again, if Starlight Girl was written by a human with a soul, I truly hope it will find that niche I mentioned, and I truly hope many little thumb suckers will hear it read to them while they gradually nod off to sleep, then wake up in the morning to see about finding the light to shine the way in the darkness.

–H R Novelton