With AI, "we are building an indifferent and inhuman God," says Rosa Montero.

Spanish writer Rosa Montero stated that, with artificial intelligence , human beings are “building an indifferent and inhuman God,” and highlighted the need to legislate this technology during a meeting at the Cervantes Institute in São Paulo.

Montero (Madrid, 1951) spoke with journalist and presenter Vera Magalhães during her visit to Brazil, where she arrived to participate in the Paraty International Literary Festival (FLIP) .

The writer, who recognized herself as a woman of letters although she confessed to being a lover of science and technology , said that she addresses the issue of AI in Difficult Animals (Seix Barral, 2025), her latest novel, which raises the question of the unconsciousness with which humans are developing an unknown superintelligence.

For the author, AI “favors us” and “makes our lives easier,” and that's why “we are blindly surrendering” to this technology that “has many risks.”

Among them, he mentioned the threat that AI could manipulate humans , "get into their brains without their knowledge" and mold them to be "exactly" the way it wants. He warned that this technology could lead to the "extermination of the human species."

"We are building, or rather, this intelligence is building itself because it is self-generating , an indifferent God," that is, an intelligence "far superior to ours, which is also an inhuman intelligence , which we will not understand, nor will we know how to relate to it, nor will we know how to control it," he stated.

"We can become the ants of artificial intelligence," the Madrid native told a packed auditorium.

In this regard, Montero cited the recent Nobel Prize winner in Physics, Geoffrey Hinton, considered one of the "godfathers" of AI, who left Google to warn about the dangers of AI getting out of control.

For Montero, "it is possible" and "we still have time" to legislate this technology , as has been done "successfully" at other times in history. "We have legislated to prevent human cloning," she exemplifies.

The writer reviewed her journalistic and literary career, which is marked by books such as The Ridiculous Idea of Never Seeing You Again (Seix Barral, 2013), one of her most famous novels that was translated into eleven languages.

This text, which he wrote two years after his partner died of cancer , is a book about “life” and “how to learn to live with more serenity, more fulfillment, and more lightness.”

And, to learn to live this way, “you must first come to terms with death”—your own and that of your loved ones.

"After a very important death, especially if it's untimely, you never recover. What you do is invent another life ," the 74-year-old author reflects.

Montero, who admits that ideas constantly pop into her head, jots down her thoughts with a fountain pen , thus giving life to the "little egg" that will become her next book.

“ You don't write to teach anything, you write to learn, to shed light on your darkness, on your obsessions. You write about the things that obsess you to try to understand them, to try to cauterize life's wounds,” he reflected.