Dacine Diaf

HUMAN AI INTERACTION:

Emotional resonance in human and AI generated literature, comparing reader response to grief and danger in The Unraveling of Whispers by claude AI and The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman.

Dacine Diaf¹

Artificial intelligence is no longer constrained to technological fields, as it has now found its way to the humanities, to literature, more specifically to its production and analysis. This joining of AI and literature raises questions about how the human reader responds to AI generated literature compared to human made literature. This study examines the difference between the human reader's response to both the emotional experiences of the protagonist in The Unraveling of Whispers generated by Claude Opus 4.6 and the narrator of The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman.This research seeks to reveal whether AI invokes the same emotions in readers that a human author can and whether the reader can feel the characters' emotions in an AI generated novel. This study utilises reader response literary theory to identify reader emotional resonance. The analysis follows a reader's emotional response to two characters' experiences with grief and danger; one is Declan the Claude AI generated character and the other is Neil Gaiman's unnamed protagonist. The results indicate that the reader emotionally resonated more intensely with the grief and sense of danger experienced by Gaiman's unnamed narrator, whereas the intensity of this emotional resonance dropped when reading about those same experiences with Declan, the protagonist of the AI generated novel.