OK, I lied. I'm not going into summer retirement just yet. I read Margaret Atwood's speech from the University of Grenada where she was given an Honourary Doctorate and it says everything about artificial intelligence and writing and the importance of the Humanities in education that I wish I could have said half so well. Take it away Margaret!
Margaret Atwood Grenada, Spain June 24, 2026
On the weekend, I was very kindly presented with an Honourary Doctorate by the University of Grenada, one of the oldest universities in Europe. Despite the blistering heat, our bow ties and robes and hats, we all survived it. I had the added joy of visiting the Alhambra — unique in the world. Special thanks to Mercedes Diaz for steering me through all the activities!
Meanwhile I thought you might like to know what I said in my speech. Here it is:
Thank you very much, and a special thanks to the faculty of the University, the Rector Pedro Mercado Pacheco, and the members of the board. Greetings also to the Ambassador of Canada, Jeffrey Marder. It is not only a great honour for me to be here with you, it is a great pleasure – for though I have visited and even lived in other cities in Spain, I have never before had the privilege of visiting Granada – a place I have always longed to see. Its rich history and its amazing architecture are gifts to the world, and I thank it for these gifts.
It is especially significant to me in these times that you have chosen to confer this honour on a writer. I’m not sure what the situation is in Spain, but teachers in the humanities are under siege in North American universities. What they teach – literature, languages, history, art history and theory, and philosophy, among others – are being branded as inessential studies in an age that is characterized as a time of rapid technological change and scientific innovation. Students are told that these studies will not help them get a job, despite the fact that many companies are looking, not for people with specialized skills, but for people who know how to innovate – who can think outside the box.
It is precisely these humanistic studies that are supposed to teach people how to think, how to create, and how to understand other people, especially people unlike themselves. A literary novel – we are told by the neurologists – is the closest, in terms of brain activity, that you will ever come to being inside another person’s mind, heart, and soul. You cannot think if you cannot speak, and if you cannot speak clearly and comprehensively. “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” is a famous aphorism credited to the poet W.H. Auden. A society that can no longer think, can no longer think clearly, and can no longer question its own assumptions is headed off a cliff. As for languages, they are perhaps the earliest strictly human technologies. They enable group cooperation, myth-making – unifying to the society – and belief in abstract concepts and entities – not an unmixed good, because nothing human is an unmixed good, but centrally important to the human story. We can’t understand where we are likely to go unless we have some grasp of where we’ve been, and stories about how we got here, to this place and time. And we can know about the past only through the arts and artifacts and documents that past ages have left behind – though even then our knowledge is bound to be incomplete. That’s why we spend so many words trying to interpret them, and also ourselves.
It is said that the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the 13th century wanted to know what language was spoken in Eden by Adam and Eve. He thought that if he brought babies up in an environment in which they never heard speech, they would spontaneously reveal this primal language. The babies were fed and clothed, but not spoken to in any way, not even in sign language. They failed to thrive, and then they died. We need language. We need emotions. We need thought. We need stories. That’s who we are, as human beings.
The other difficulty the humanities are having is a crises of the classroom. Students, we are told, are resorting to AI chatbots to write their essays for them. This practice has spread like wildfire. The writing of an essay is supposed to teach you, the writer – but if you haven’t written it yourself, you have learned nothing, except how to cheat. And if everyone else is cheating, and benefitting from it, why shouldn’t you? So there’s been a big return to in-classroom tests and mini-essays, just has there has been a reaction against screens in general.
Then there’s the problem of free speech versus censorship. Never in modern times, in the United States – which, during the Cold War, was considered the world’s beacon of freedom and its main bastion of free speech – have we seen so many books banned from libraries and pulled from schools. Who is allowed to say what, and to whom? Censorship is not a new thing – every society has its own version of the unspeakable, the taboo, the treasonous, the blasphemous; but it’s a matter of subject, degree and kind. The clamouring for freedom of speech by a political party in opposition, followed by clampdowns and media suppression once that party wins – especially if it wins by revolution, that is, by the overthrowing of an existing system and its replacement by another – is noteworthy.
The French Revolution – which I consider to be the first modern revolution, that is, the first one depending on a populist mob – was all in favour of free speech before the Revolution happened. Of course they were – they wanted to be able to denounce the existing order. The actual revolution was preceded by forty years or so of vigorous pamphleteering. Once the revolutionaries were in power and had begun the power struggles among factions that followed, printing presses were smashed, publications were suppressed, and eventually – at the outset of the Terror – laws were enacted that included, among other things such as the barring of evidence at trials – the condemning of those suspected of having counter-revolutionary thoughts. How could the revolutionary tribunals tell what kind of thoughts a person was having? Don’t even ask. They could just tell. And many heads rolled. It was the same during Stalin’s purges: at the show trials, people confessed to things they hadn’t done, and even to things unknown to themselves. This is what Orwell is referring to in 1984, with the phrase “thoughtcrime.” The regime in 1984 intends to consolidate its power – the boot grinding into the human face forever – by removing any words from the language that would allow people to do what we might now, still, call “thinking.” Will AI be able to accomplish this? Let’s find out.
I hasten to add that revolutions can be of the right as well as the left. The Wheel of Fate turns, the bottom becomes the top, but that wheel can turn from left to right as well as from right to left. Note the vigorous agitation for free speech before the Trumpites gained power. Note the media suppressions, lawsuits, firings, and newspaper and television takeovers since. The United States does not have a state media yet, and it is not exactly smashing printing presses; but not for want of desire.
As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that in 1984 there are novel-writing machines that churn out romantic slop for the masses. The heroine, Julia, works in this department.
“Julia was twenty-six years old... and she worked…on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor... She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She ‘didn’t much care for reading,’ she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.”
The novel-writing machine was fantasy in 1948, when Orwell was composing his book. But perhaps it’s not fantasy now. There has been a recent incident involving the Commonwealth Literature prizes concerning a story that won a prize but was then accused of being generated by Artificial Intelligence. Two AI analysis sites said it was, two said it wasn’t. Since these Artificial Intelligence analysts were Als themselves, where does that leave us? Maybe back in the land of real human writing. Or maybe in 1984. If the latter, goodbye to the act of real human writing. I don’t think that will happen, but let’s find out.
So far, I have spoken only about crises in the humanities. But these are taking place in the context of a perfect storm of other crises. Three crucial wars—the one in Ukraine, the one in Gaza, the one in Iran. The rearrangement of the geopolitical order that these wars have produced – the diminishing of world power and prestige for Russia and the United States and Israel, the rise of China. The environmental crises – the extinction of species, the degrading of ecosystems, the destruction of habitats both animal and vegetable, but also human: we need oxygen to breathe, and if we destroy the life of the oceans, it’s gone. The economic crises: rising prices, job disruptions, and the long, long list.
Let me throw state debt and famine into the mix. Both preceded the French Revolution. Just saying.
Right now, you in Spain are in a comparatively positive position. You are not at war. You are quite far from Russia. You are unlikely to be attacked by Iran. You have a rich history and a diverse and fascinating cultural tapestry. You have a constitutional monarchy – a democracy with a kindly king as head of state – and as Canada has the same sort of arrangement, I naturally think it’s a good one. You are unlikely to welcome a totalitarian dictatorship any time soon. Could it be that if times turn darker, Spain will become – as Ireland was during the Middle Ages – a sanctuary for the preservation of literacy and learning? It’s not out of the question.
In conclusion, I thank you once again, I promise that this speech was not written by Artificial Intelligence but by me, and I wish for us all the survival of the humanities, as well as the best of luck.
Thank you.