Soyinka asks tech innovators to prevent AI from eroding human creativity
Wole Soyinka, the Nobel laureate, has urged scientists and technology innovators to prevent artificial intelligence (AI) from eroding human creativity.
Soyinka spoke on Friday at the 2026 Nigerian Prize Awards Night organised by Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) Limited in Lagos, with the theme ‘Heritage’.
The playwright said the humanities must help establish ethical boundaries for AI development, arguing that technological advancement should not come at the expense of human imagination and independent thought.
“Everybody now is talking about artificial intelligence, I believe that is is going to be the challenge of the immediate future,” he said.
“It is not as if we are trying to stop the work of imagination altogether; we are just saying that some philosophy must enter, otherwise, we’ll all be sitting here and the next thing we know, some robot will come and feed us our own amala, and this is when the real war will begin.”
Soyinka said the threat posed by AI remained real despite its potential to facilitate human progress.
“But the menace that AI constitutes, despite the fascination with this incredible facilitator for human progress… the menace is a very real one and it is the humanities that must come to the rescue,” he said.
Soyinka warned that allowing machines to produce works traditionally associated with human imagination could gradually diminish people’s capacity for original thought and creative expression.
“When AI begins to write our thesis, to write our poetry, or to claim that they are writing our poetry for us, there’s danger. That means we’re being dehumanised; we are allowing our imagination to atrophy,” he added.
The Nobel laureate also raised concerns about AI-generated replicas of writers and other creative professionals.
“When you begin to see a clone of a writer, a clone of the prize winner, on the internet, masquerading, imitating gestures which you thought could only be made by human beings, then there’s a real problem. And so I urge the synthesis, one which is created by philosophy of creativity in itself. Machines cannot create for us,” he said.
Soyinka called for closer collaboration between science and the humanities to ensure that technological development remained guided by human values and an understanding of creativity.
“So, I appeal to all of you, please humanise machines. Do not let machines machinise humanity,” he said.
