Text: Shirley Haasnoot | Photos: Peter Valckx
Writing Anna Karenina reportedly took Leo Tolstoy around four years. A century and a half later, we live in an era in which artificial intelligence (AI) can produce a similarly hefty novel in just a few minutes. It is becoming increasingly difficult to tell that no human effort was involved. Confronted with the elusive and lightning-fast rise of AI, Writer in Residence Thomas Heerma van Voss posed a number of existential questions.
‘The inevitable question is what this means for literature,’ he said during his Abraham Kuyper Lecture 2026, delivered in the packed Aula of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. ‘And, by extension: why should you - why should I - continue writing? Why would anyone still read a book written by an author?’
Heerma van Voss (1990) explained that he wrote his first pieces in his twenties. About hip-hop music, in what he described as ‘a little online corner’. He was fortunate, he said, to be able to muddle through there — and also that writing a good text still required real effort, in a time before AI as we know it today existed. Through ‘dead-end paragraphs and airless sentences’, through trial and error, he gradually learned the craft.
Students wrote about what feels 'real,' without using AI
Over the past academic year, he served as Vrije Schrijver at VU Amsterdam. Heerma van Voss taught as a guest lecturer in the Creative Writing course, during which he and his students visited writers such as Maartje Wortel, Adriaan van Dis, and other fellow authors at their homes. Through the essay competition “Who Writes Your Words”, he challenged students to write about what feels “real”, without using AI.
With the Abraham Kuyper Lecture, titled Human Effort, he concluded his appointment at the university. The lecture became a plea for the unique and the personal, for “rough-edged art” and “human input”, for “searching thoughts and imperfect stories”. Because perhaps it is precisely through these that something is suddenly revealed, or that something previously elusive is touched upon. ‘Even Anna Karenina,’ he said, ‘was preceded by more modest and less sparkling prose. Tolstoy needed that in order to write the novel.’
After Heerma van Voss had mainly posed questions, two VU scientists responded from the perspective of their own disciplines. Felienne Hermans, professor of computer science education and computer science teacher at the Open Schoolgemeenschap Bijlmer, reflected on the unique aspects of our identity. ‘Everyone has their own story to tell,’ said the popular professor, who herself does not use a smartphone. ‘And that is the kind of resistance we need against AI.’
'Give me a bad essay, because then I can help you get better'
Universities also have a role to play in this, as students arrive there often still unsure of who they are. How can they discover what makes them unique? ‘That is what we should be talking about. And it is difficult, because we often want to fit students into the same mould.’ Hermans suggested assessing students on the basis of the effort they put in and the learning process they go through, rather than solely on the final result. ‘I would much rather receive a bad essay, because then I can help you improve.’
Art historian Klazina Botke discussed the human desire for authenticity in literature and art, and the importance of the context in which a work was created. We would rather look at a portrait painted by Rembrandt than at a copy by an unknown student from his workshop, even if the latter painting may be just as beautiful. We see, hear, or read a work of art differently when we know who created it and how it came into being.
This preference for authenticity was also evident in the responses of the two winners of the essay competition, law student Jezennia Boateng and Literature and Society student Ninthe de Meulder. After AI had rewritten their personal stories, they did not actually consider the result an improvement. ‘I actually think it is a very beautiful text,’ Boateng said about the AI version of her essay. ‘But because the text feels so obvious, I would never write it this way myself.’
A small piece of AI music was actually quite listenable
Artificial intelligence has not yet proven particularly successful in composing music either, the audience heard from Daan Doeleman, PhD candidate at Amsterdam UMC and chair of the VU Chamber Choir. ‘We tried it, but it was really very bad. So we abandoned the idea.’ Still, the short fragment of AI-generated music that the VU Chamber Choir performed afterwards was actually quite listenable.
Yet it could not compare to the complex and intriguing composition To the Field of Stars by British composer Gabriël Jackson (1962), with which the evening concluded. Under the direction of regular conductor Krista Audere, more than thirty singers and musicians delivered a unique performance about the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, based on both contemporary and twelfth-century texts and music. It formed a musical response to the questions Heerma van Voss had raised at the beginning of the evening.
And what does the computer say when, later at home, a visitor puts those same questions to ChatGPT? The following text immediately appears on the screen: ‘You continue to write because the process of thinking and the authentic human voice cannot be replaced by the press of a button.’ The chatbot continues: ‘Although AI tools can generate texts in seconds, computer-generated writing lacks the unique soul, depth, and personal reflection that emerge when you formulate something yourself.’ So has AI, after all, had the final word?
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With the annual Abraham Kuyper Lecture, VU honours its founder, who was, after all, a particularly prolific writer and publicist himself. An extended version of the lecture can be found in the book Menselijke moeite (2026), published this year by VU University Press.
- The VU Chamber Choir can still be heard on Friday, June 16, in Utrecht and Sunday, June 28, in Amsterdam.
- Subscribe to Felienne Hermans' weekly newsletter on AI here
The appointment of the Writer in Residence and essay are made possible in part by VUvereniging.
