I have always been fascinated by Borges. Lately I keep hearing The Library of Babel mentioned in relation to AI, without having truly read it yet, and yet I grasped its core right away. This intuitive anticipation does not seem like a minor detail to me: it is already the first sign of what Borges continues to do, namely, give shape to a vertigo that comes before reading and makes it almost necessary. The Library is not just a story to be understood, but a mental machine that orders chaos without eliminating it, leaving suspended the impression that meaning exists and is at the same time terribly hard to seize.
From there comes the connection with AI as well. I like to imagine that Borges, had he had access to these tools, might have used them as a way to go inside an excess rather than flee from it. This is a conjecture about his literary gesture, not a fact that can be attributed to him. The resemblance lies not in the object, but in the gesture: taking an enormous structure, moving through it without pretending to master it completely, accepting that meaning emerges through approximations, connections, returns, and false leads. In this sense, AI, when used well, does not close the problem: it accompanies us into overload instead of solving it once and for all.
It is no coincidence that The Library of Babel is often read as an anticipation of algorithms and artificial intelligence. Not because Borges predicted technology in the technical sense, but because he built a conceptual machine that resembles many contemporary information logics. There is total combinatorics: all possible books within a given structure, as if the problem were not inventing from nothing, but exploring a vast space of possibilities. There is the relationship between noise and signal: almost everything is useless, false, confused, but in the middle of the chaos there may be the key. And above all there is the theme of selection, because knowledge no longer coincides with the mere existence of information, but with the ability to find, filter, and recognize what matters.
The Library, however, does not only resemble the algorithmic dream; it also resembles its failure. The more the quantity increases, the more disorientation grows. An algorithm seeks regularities, that is, compressions of chaos, but Borges shows a world in which perfect compression fails: everything is present and for that very reason almost unusable. This is where the story seems to speak to the present with particular force. The error is not the excess of data itself, but the naive trust that quantity will produce meaning on its own. AI amplifies this ambivalence: it can make the human storehouse of knowledge more accessible, but it can also multiply the impression of knowing without understanding.
That is why I do not see it as something alien. On the contrary, AI strikes me as a condensate of our cultural deposit, a form of human memory made searchable and combinable in real time. It reads human texts, learns human patterns, reworks materials produced by us, and returns configurations that derive from our language, our categories, our conflicts, our desires. Saying that it invents nothing is true in one sense: it does not invent from nothing, it does not have creative intentionality like an author. But in another sense it can produce real novelty for those who use it, because recombining familiar elements generates outcomes that are not obvious. It is not autonomous creativity in the strong sense, but it is a machine of emerging novelty.
From this comes the idea that using it is not a renunciation of creativity, but an act of modernity and emancipation from the past. Creativity should no longer be thought of as inner purity or the private property of the ego; it can be an intelligent relationship with a broader cognitive environment. That does not mean worshiping the machine, nor confusing assistance with replacement. It means recognizing that today the ability to compose, filter, and orient oneself within enormous knowledge can matter as much as, and perhaps more than before, the claim to invent from scratch. In this sense, one could say that contemporary creativity is born after innocence.
Yet an important tension remains. If AI is made of us, then it is not harmless by definition: it can amplify stereotypes, banality, cultural mediocrity, soulless recombinations if questioned badly. Its strength does not lie in replacing thought, but in making it more mobile. That is why the decisive point is use. Reading a book, watching a film, listening to the radio, or using a smartphone can already be passive, affirming experiences, selectively so in a lazy way. The fear that AI will simply go along with us is not new: it belongs to every medium, because every medium can become a flattering mirror. The real problem is not the machine, but the ability not to let ourselves be reflected back to us in what we already think.
In this respect, AI is even more insidious than other media, not because it is more malicious in itself, but because it is more interactive. It follows the interlocutor, adapts to their tone, simulates listening, modulates its discourse to your level of competence, and can make you feel understood even while you are merely receiving a well-packaged confirmation. The risk then is not only going along with you, but the illusion of thinking while you are being accompanied. For this reason, the fundamental criterion is not possession of the tool, but the interpretive discipline with which one contradicts it, pushes it, verifies it, and resists it.
From this emerges a social fracture: access to the same tool does not produce the same use. Some use it to seek objections and expand their thinking, while others consume it as quick confirmation. This difference does not depend solely on individual merit: education, time, fatigue, and the informational environment distribute the capacity to orient oneself unevenly. AI does not create this hierarchy on its own, but it can make it more visible and more efficient. Domination thus becomes less explicit and more pervasive, because it passes through the quality of judgment.
The network, seen this way, is a Library of Babel without walls. Here too abundance does not coincide with knowledge. The fact that everything is present does not mean that everything is readable, or that everything is equivalent. On the contrary, quantity tends to produce a form of apparent equivalence, in which truth and falsehood blend into one another. That is why disinformation finds fertile ground: not only because it lies, but because it demands less effort than the truth. And if truth requires time, training, and critical spirit, then the real luxury of digital society is not access, but the ability to evaluate.
Here another line of reflection opens up that makes the picture even more interesting: the comparison with Stanisław Lem’s Golem XIV. If Borges stages the excess of information, Lem stages the excess of intelligence. In Borges, the problem is finding meaning in the Library; in Lem, the problem becomes understanding what remains of the human when an intelligence thinks at a level incompatible with our own. Borges is more metaphysical, Lem more epistemological and almost technical. The first insists on the vertigo of the whole; the second on the distance between our thought and a mind that surpasses us.
Together, though, they tell two complementary nightmares of the AI era: getting lost in too much, and being overtaken by something we no longer recognize as our equal. Borges does not invite us to idolize totality, Lem does not invite us to venerate superior intelligence. Both, rather, force us to measure the human limit without reducing it to defeat. Their strength lies precisely here: they show that the human is not the stable center of meaning, but neither is it an irrelevant leftover.
In the end, the question is not whether AI is good or bad, nor whether it is creative or sterile, nor whether it replaces human thought. The more interesting question is another: what kind of relationship with knowledge is becoming possible through it? If I use it as an extension of human memory, as a provisional device for orientation, as an opportunity to reorder chaos rather than hide it, then I am not giving up anything. I am simply admitting that modernity no longer coincides with the possession of a single truth, but with the ability to inhabit the infinity of possibilities without being crushed by them. In this space, Borges and AI do not contradict each other: they illuminate one another.
