In recent years, generative artificial intelligence has taken over the creative field, threatening to replace artists, writers, and musicians. Many creatives worry about the development of software like ChatGPT and Midjourney, anxious that their jobs are now obsolete. This has led to a devaluation of human artwork as AI replaces the creation of art with instant gratification, leading people to search for meaning in AI instead of creating it themselves. The work of Jorge Luis Borges has many parallels to the development of AI, exploring themes of probability, meaning, and significance. Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine writer known for his impact on Spanish literature. His book “Ficciones”, a collection of short stories, had a massive influence on Latin American fantasy and magical realism. His works touch upon themes of labyrinths, chance, and the concept of infinity. Borges’s concept of the Library of Babel proves the unsustainability of generative AI models by encouraging people to create for themselves instead of trying to find meaning in a vast sea of cacophony and noise.
One of Borges’s most well known stories is “The Library of Babel”, which can be seen as an allegory for how generative artificial intelligence functions, as well as its futility. “The Library of Babel” tells the story of an enormous library that contains every possible combination of letters. In this universe, books are arranged on shelves in hexagonal rooms. Each book is exactly 410 pages, each book has 40 lines, and each line has 80 characters. The library contains every possible ordering of the 25 basic characters (22 letters, the period, the comma, and the space). This means the library has every book that could possibly be written and everything that can possibly be expressed in words and in language. It contains the entire works of Shakespeare, every great work of literature that has ever been written and will be written, the interpolation of all books into other books, and the true story of your life and death. However, the vast majority of books are pure gibberish, and any text that appears to have meaning was generated through random chance alone. Despite this, the people in the Library of Babel think there is meaning in these books. They scour the hexagons in search of their Vindications - books that would vindicate the crimes and actions of every human being for all time. However, this effort is futile, and the narrator notes that due to the vastness of the library, the chances of one finding their own Vindication (or some variation of it) is zero.
Generative AI operates in a similar fashion. Large language models are a giant prediction machine. They work by guessing what you will say next based on statistical data it scoured from the internet, like a more sophisticated form of autocorrect and autocomplete. LLMs have no thought of their own, and merely generate text on probability. However, people think it has meaning, since it does a deceptively good job of mimicking human speech and authority. People go to it for advice and information, hoping to find something of value among the noise. What they fail to realize is that they are searching for significance in a sea of words that has been strung together by a machine, with no inherent meaning. Like the Library of Babel, the chances of finding anything of value in a LLM such as ChatGPT are abysmally low, and even if the machine spits out something that happens to be true, it would be by coincidence rather than fact, rendering it completely unreliable. Humanity’s hubris convinces us that we can find something meaningful in the Library of Babel that is AI. The idea that one does not have to put forth any effort is appealing, promising immediate results without hard work in this era of instant gratification. One only has to lie back, click refresh, and hope that AI can deliver the answers to all their perils. Each individual believes they are in possession of great treasure, and the thought that somewhere in the endless sea of noise lies valuable information brings great elation and hope, trapping people in an endless cycle of generating nonsense.
However, the human brain fails to comprehend just how vast the library is, and how unlikely it is to find any coherent sentence at all, much less valuable information. “The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel” by mathematician William Goldbloom Bloch dives into the mathematical concepts behind Borges’s story, contextualizing the sheer enormity of the library. In the first chapter on combinatorics, Bloch calculates that the Library contains 25¹³¹²⁰⁰⁰ books (25 to the power of 1,312,000). To put this number into context, our current universe contains only 10⁸⁰ atoms, making the size of the Library impossible to conceptualize using the observable universe as a benchmark. It would take over 15 million years for light to traverse the length of the library. A mortal human traveler would only be able to search 2 light minutes of the Library in their lifetime. Searching for one’s Vindication or life story in such a giant collection of books is hopeless, and the chance of finding anything even remotely meaningful is smaller than the chance of winning the lottery thousands of times in a row.
Another work that puts the scale of the Library of Babel into context is “A Short Stay in Hell” by Steven L. Peck. In 2009, Mormon author and evolutionary biologist Peck published his novel “A Short Stay in Hell”, a psychological horror that describes hell as the Library of Babel. The main character Soren is sent to The Library of Babel after he dies, and the only way to escape is to find the book that contains his true life story, with no grammatical errors or spelling mistakes. The library in the book is arranged a bit differently than in Borges’s version, with two sides of shelves separated by a chasm. There are a seemingly endless number of floors, and the floors extend down and up as far as the eye can see. After searching the monotonous library for thousands of years yet finding nothing coherent, Soren falls into a deep despair and flings himself into the vast chasm separating the two sides of the library. Eons later, he reaches the bottom floor, and starts his search in earnest. This novel puts the enormity of the Library into context. Even though Soren falls past thousands of floors every day, it still takes him several eons of freefall to reach the bottom floor. The novel describes his deteriorating mental state in great detail as he slowly becomes aware of how large the library really is. Finding one singular volume in such an endless landscape of books is like finding a needle in a universe of haystacks. Similarly, trying to find the perfect image or text by prompting AI is impossible.
Recently in 2015, a website was created to simulate the Library of Babel. Jonathan Basile, a programmer and author, created The Library of Babel website, a site that mimics the library outlined in Borges’s story through algorithms. Users can randomly choose a volume, search for specific text, or browse through the library. There is also an “Anglishize” feature that highlights coherent English words on a page. Currently the website can generate all possible strings of text of 3,200 characters, for a total of 1.956 × 101,834,097 books. In fact, this entire paragraph can be found in the Library of Babel here. There is also an Image Library of Babel which applies Borges’s concepts to the visual field. It permutes 4096 colors to create all possible images with the dimensions 416 by 640 pixels. Every great work of art is in the image archives, as well as photos of the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe, your birth, and your funeral. However, the vast majority of images look like random static. This is reminiscent of AI image generators, which predict pixels instead of creating with meaning like humans do. There is also a Sound Library of Babel that contains all possible 15-second samples. Somewhere among all the white noise clips are every song that has ever been written. Just like the original Library of Babel website, the visual and auditory archives are searchable. Users can upload images or sound files and find the exact location of that file in the library, with exact coordinates. Each file has its own specific location with a long string of letters and numbers specifying its location in the Library, and the algorithm makes it so that the same file will always be at the same location. These sites make the abstract concept of Borges’s novel more tangible. By allowing us to experience the agony of sifting through pages and pages of nonsense, it helps us build empathy towards the characters in the Library of Babel. It is an unnerving and fascinating experience to witness firsthand that all the writing, art, and music that you create has already existed in the library long before you have created it, elusive and hidden among billions and billions of other randomly generated content.
AI makes grand promises of productivity and revenue earning potential that are often too good to be true. Most of the hype surrounding AI is speculative. Billions of dollars have been poured into AI development with no real results in sight; Recently, popular AI video generation app Sora was forced to shut down due to it losing money for OpenAI. Although AI has gotten a lot of media attention, the bubble is starting to burst as people realize how inefficient it actually is. In the art industry, artists have found AI to be completely incompetent at creating consistent designs. AI’s primary mode of operation is divergent, meaning it branches out instead of narrowing down. It is iterative, creating something completely different every time. However, in art and especially in sequential storytelling fields such as comics and animation, consistency is vital. It is important for a character to look consistent across different shots and panels so the audience can follow the story. AI animated films and AI illustrated books have been criticized for their soullessness and inconsistency, as every page and frame looked different. Just like how there are no two books in the Library of Babel that are exactly the same, no two pieces of AI generated content are alike. It is ironic that machines are known for consistency and repetitiveness, yet that is the one thing AI image models are incapable of. AI is the unthinking, unfeeling Library, making arrays of pixels without understanding what those pixels are representing. In contrast, artists draw through understanding. They know that lines are the boundaries of forms, how light and shadow works, and what good design is. Through doing, they process the information and create work that is so much richer in quality and meaning than AI or the Library will ever be able to.
One lesson that can be gleaned from Borges’s short story is the power of creation and of the human mind. Borges’s Library of Babel can be seen as a metaphor for AI that shows the uselessness of searching for meaning in it. While bashing AI, the story of the Library simultaneously celebrates human creativity by encouraging us to take action to control our own destiny. Like the Library, AI only achieves an imitation of art by random chance and brute forcing of all options, while humans create with intention. It is an interesting thought experiment to think of humans as the librarians of the Library of Babel. The process of creation is a more methodical and direct way of searching the Library’s vast catalogue. Instead of aimlessly sifting through every possible combination of pixels or words by repeatedly prompting AI, people can search directly through writing or drawing what is on their mind. Even though the result is already in the library, it has infinitely more significance and emotion when created by someone rather than made by random chance. Also, it would have taken an unreasonable amount of time to find it by brute force alone. Borges’s story proves that generative AI is a highly inefficient way of creation, and the most authentic, sincere way to find your Vindication or life story is to make it yourself.
Bibliography
Jorge Luis Borges, et al. The Library of Babel. 1941. Boston, David R. Godine, 2000.
Jorge Luis Borges. Ficciones. Barcelona Lumen, 2019.
Peck, Steven L. A Short Stay in Hell. 2012.
William Goldbloom Bloch. The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel. Oxford University Press, 25 Aug. 2008.
Basile, Jonathan. “Library of Babel.” Libraryofbabel.info, 2015, libraryofbabel.info/.
Basile, Jonathan. “Babel Image Archives.” Libraryofbabel.info, 2025, babelia.libraryofbabel.info/.
Jakim. “Sound Library of Babel.” Jakim.it, 2026, www.soundbabel.jakim.it/. Accessed 1 May 2026.
