The article discusses the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the translation of a literary text. The modern era is marked by the transition of mankind to a new stage in the digital technologies development and the emergence of such a terminological designation as “the digital literary translation”. The work of AI has long gone beyond performing simple search requests on various subject areas in the dialog box mode. With the development of neural networks it is possible to mention that “a smart machine” is “an essence that can think, develop and form the rudiments of consciousness, perception of itself and the surrounding reality” [8, pp. 70]. Systems based on neural networks can generate unique texts in different languages, compose poetry and translate an entire book in a matter of seconds. The fragments of the novel “Fire and blood” by George R. R. Martin, translated from the English language into Russian by the expert, ChatGPT, Google and Yandex Translators are the illustrative material of our research. The methods of comparative, oppositional and contextual analysis and deduction were used in the course of the research. The problems connected with the emergence of a new complex system of contradictory relations in the “human – AI” tandem, which the translator encounters in the course of his professional activity, seem to be relevant. The results of the research show that the main obstacle to the full automation of the literary text translation process is the inability to classify and encode the translator’s cognitive abilities and creative activity in the program.