I recall that in my youth we were told that every child’s dream should pass through Disneyland, the Paris version (1992), because although the American one (1955) had existed long before, a middle- to lower-income Spanish family like mine would have found it somewhat out of reach. Yet there was nothing else, only that Parisian park for those lucky enough to be whisked away through a cluster of classic tales and stars. However, and since 1977, there existed another park in France—an extraordinary one that has been named the best park in the world on multiple occasions, competing in attendance with the Museum of the Louvre or the very Eiffel Tower. A place where the magic was so sumptuous and seductive that hundreds of its actors were volunteers. It wasn’t until just a decade ago that I learned of its existence from a Swiss friend, who encouraged me to visit and to settle inside, where I could sleep in a medieval castle, in a Viking hut, or even in a Roman-style tent.
I thought it was a joke. How could such a place exist—and, by the way, much cheaper than EuroDisney—without me or any of my acquaintances knowing about it? She told me that perhaps I only read or listened to what others said, never seeking other paths. Never exploring. In any case, I had surrendered to the coarse, blunt knowledge of the world, to its advertising and marketing, taking for granted which things and places were coveted and which were not. Television, radio, and travel agencies had steered my thinking from a very young age. I decided to explore and I traveled to northern France to discover Puy du Fou, which is now familiar to all of you because a kind of branch was created in Toledo, a place I have also visited.
That experience made me question the mental prototypes we hold about what is visitable, interesting, or wild. Social, political, and cultural marketing has been packing everything into a neat box. Now it is reinforced by Artificial Intelligence, which we allow to decide for us, to tell us what is right or wrong, to deliver its own version of general culture and of the world in particular. The fact that its summaries and data can be steered by ideological and political guidelines seems not to trouble us, apparently.
Indeed, you can sometimes quickly detect when an author has used Artificial Ignorance in the plot of an action novel: you notice that the Russians are always the villains and, often, there is someone who is a lethal weapon in themselves, but who has amnesia and only astonishes insiders with their karate keys at moments of peak tension.
Yet it isn’t always easy to tell which text contains AI or not, because the vast pastiche that this technology entails collects so many works that, for a professional computer detector, even the Quixote would be the product of AI. But do not be fooled. If you encounter a journalistic article or a short novel stuffed with pithy phrases like proverbs, antagonisms (“young in spirit, old in skin”), or ordinary sentences in which suddenly a highly scholarly adjective or name appears that isn’t in the author’s usual style, beware.
AI is useful. Security, medicine, science. But where are the norms and legal pathways? Politicians drafting legislative provisions, where are you hiding? I feel embarrassed for my government and for Europe due to the conscious legal vacuum on the use of AI across every field, and within the very literary world I see deserters: Philippe Jaenada, winner of the prestigious Goncourt Prize up to 2026, has admitted a moderate use of AI for his texts, arguing that “we must domesticate AI and prevent it from replacing us.” Furthermore, Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize in Literature, has acknowledged using AI as a form of “support” in her creative work. With some nerve. And Jorge Volpi, a renowned Mexican writer, has also admitted having “dialogued” with AI to create at least one character in his latest novel; and not only that, but he has, with Fuentetaja, led a writing workshop titled “A Creative Dialogue with AI,” without forgetting that the creator, the director, and the guide is the machine, not the human. And that machine draws ideas from a shared, external thought. Of what human sector? Of what cultural level and what social circumstances? It seems it doesn’t matter, as long as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini work and tell us what we must do to succeed in this sad life.
In the height of absurdities, in France—does everything happen in France?—they have invented the Prix Pascal, whose sole requirement to participate is to present the text in French, with the technical detail of which AI tools were used.
I wonder if we will continue following the crowd, the herd, and believe that AI is a progress with no dangers or side effects, just as I once believed that the happy world of lucky people was EuroDisney, as if there were nothing else.