What3words is a tool that allows you to communicate your location – wherever you are on earth – using three words. It is backed by a geolocation system that has divided the world into 3m x 3m squares and given each one a unique three-word address. 

The idea behind what3words is that it is much easier to share your location using three words compared to other geolocation systems, such as GPS, which involve listing lots of numbers separated by dots and commas. 

This means that, in an emergency, you could tell responders your location more quickly and precisely. Other suggested use cases include pointing delivery drivers to the correct entrances for large buildings, or helping people create designated meeting places at music festivals.     

Most people’s experience of what3words, however, will be looking up the 3-word address for where they live and being amused by the odd combination of words that they’re shown. 

This amusement reveals something important: that the words used in what3words addresses aren’t empty signifiers. They have meaning, and when combined and used to refer to places, our response to those addresses reveals something about how we see the world. 

Pin the Tale takes this observation one step further. It is an online game that encourages players to write stories about places in the UK using their what3words addresses, pinning them to a digital map. It involves deliberately playing with the associations that what3words addresses have and thinking about their relationships with the places they refer to. 

Stories on Pin the Tale must include all three words in the what3words address of the place being written about. They can be up to 300 words in length, and writers must include a photograph taken at the location, alongside a short hint that describes the place in plain English. 

Once stories have been added to the platform, other users can read them and attempt to identify their exact locations. After they put a correct what3words address in a story’s answer box, the story is added to their collection.       

As the game’s creator, I’ve been able to observe the unique ways this system affects the processes of creative writing and storytelling, the kinds of stories told and how they connect to the places in question. 

In this article, I’m going to talk about some trends I’ve noticed in how people write stories with Pin the Tale, and what we can learn from these observations about the affordances of what3words as a storytelling tool.

From description to juxtaposition 

The first thing to note is that the words in each what3words address have no deliberate link to the place they are attached to, instead being determined arbitrarily by an algorithm. 

This lack of context makes the words feel ‘random’, and part of the amusement we often get from reading 3-word addresses is the obscurity of the word combinations themselves, and the fact that these weird groups of words have been linked to places we’re familiar with. 

What’s happening here is juxtaposition: a process of putting elements side-by-side, where you are invited to consider the relationship between them. In this case, juxtaposing the individual words with each other, and the combination of words with the place. 

Occasionally, you can find places where the words seem particularly apt (for example, a bench in Canterbury where one word in its what3words address is ‘bench’) and 3-word addresses that fit well together in a sentence or seem to suggest a narrative. But most of the time the words have no obvious connection to each other or the place to which they’re attached. 

What does this mean when you attempt to write site-specific stories with them? 

Well, creative writing already makes ample use of techniques where the words being used do not literally describe the thing you’re writing about. 

Imagery – the use of similes and metaphors to help paint a picture in the reader’s mind – is a prime example.  

Idioms are another example: sayings or turns-of-phrase used to express common sentiments, that often cannot be easily understood without being familiar with the cultural context in which they’re expressed. 

Given the lack of literal connections between 3-word addresses and their locations, it is perhaps no surprise that many contributors to Pin the Tale are drawn to styles of writing that are more figurative. 

Pin the Tale story written using the words ‘valve’, ‘minute’ and ‘gown’.

The story above uses the words ‘valve’ and ‘minute’ to craft a fantasy about its location in Bath, inspired by the true history of the architect John Wood, who designed the road layout to look like a key from above. The third word, ‘gown’, is used metaphorically to describe how the tree’s leaves appear as if they are cloaking a secret. 

Poetic forms are also commonly employed by writers on Pin the Tale. 

Pin the Tale story written using the words ‘leans’, ‘wing’ and ‘organ’.

In the example above, two of the address words – ‘leans’ and ‘wing’ – are metaphors that conjure an image of a person’s position in relation to the city. The rest of the poem is crafted around the core theme of a spiritual resonance that can exist between a single human and a place at a particular time. 

What we can say, then, is that writing with what3words often inspires a turn from the literal to the figurative; from description to juxtaposition. Contributors to Pin the Tale employ a style of writing that is typically less factual and on-the-nose, but rather evokes the relationships between things, and particularly how they pertain to the places being written about.                  

Shifts in perspective 

Many people approach the task of writing with what3words by thinking about a place that is meaningful to them in some way. Then they look at the 3-word address for their chosen spot and think “How on earth am I going to fit these words in?” The words simply don’t align with their understanding of what is significant about the place, even if they try thinking more figuratively. 

Sometimes, the words are just too oddly specific to make them work in the context of your narrative. It’s going to be hard to write a story that includes words like ‘crouton’, ‘peroxide’, ‘gearbox’ and ‘megawatt’ unless the tale you’re telling happens to relate to those specific things. 

Another common culprit is verbs. Verbs used in what3words addresses can be conjugated in all sorts of ways, and it is surprising how challenging it can be to include a verb that is in a different person or tense to the one you intended to write in. 

How do you overcome these constraints? 

The solution that many Pin the Tale players have adopted is to write their story from a different perspective. 

Pin the Tale story written using the words ‘petal’, ‘ready’ and ‘short’.

In the above example, the word ‘petal’ led the author to write a story about a friend visiting their canal boat from the perspective of a strawberry plant. The details contained within the narrative have a different quality when described from this point of view. The weather, and the sense of expectation around the fruit, become driving forces in the story. And in my reading, they interestingly convey the complexities of timing in adult friendships.                   

Pin the Tale story written using the words ‘nips’, ‘smarting’ and ‘bashful’.

In ‘Just follow your nose!’, with one of the three words being ‘nips’ – a verb in the third person – it becomes difficult to talk about the stinkpipe from the first-person perspective of a human observer saying that they ‘nip past it’. By telling the story from the perspective of the object, the human becomes the third person described by the verb. And it gives the author the opportunity to personify the stinkpipe in an entertaining yet informative way. 

Players often tell me that it is more difficult to come to Pin the Tale with a particular story in mind that you want to write. When you do approach the task this way, it can become a tactical process of finding ways to shoehorn your given words into a narrative you have already mapped out. Or alternatively, if your chosen place is covered by more than one what3words square, finding an address with words that are easier to fit into your story. 

By letting your story be shaped by the given words, you go from thinking about what a place means to you, or what a place is commonly known for, to a sense of what it could mean: to a different person or entity, in a different context. The words change your perspective. 

Jumping-off points 

What we can begin to see from these observations is that writing with what3words has a peculiar effect of revealing relations between things, perhaps more than the things themselves. If you’re going to make sense of the significance that three arbitrary words might have for a place, then you’re going to have to find some kind of connection between them, whether that is based on material reality or imagination. 

What’s exciting about this process is that different people will perceive completely different connections between the same sets of words in the same places. 

I recently ran a poetry workshop using Pin the Tale, where one of our activities was to write a collaborative poem about a chosen place using its what3words address. It was fascinating how the different attendees interpreted the task. One person wrote about their memory of meeting a friend in the place. Another person imagined the place as the epicentre of a future political uprising. Other attendees wrote about a wide variety of things that you can physically find there. 

It’s for this exact reason that Pin the Tale allows multiple stories to be pinned to the same what3words square. Even within such a small area, with the same combination of words, the range of potential associations is vast. 

One of the most common pieces of feedback I get from players is that the game’s constraints are a source of inspiration. Having to include the three words in your story means that you aren’t starting from a blank sheet. Instead, there is already a jumping-off point; something for writers to connect to and branch out from in their own unique ways. 

Extend this writing process over an entire city, or a country, and you can imagine the rich tapestry of stories that can be woven. Click on the Find Stories button when you first load up Pin the Tale – when the map shows the whole of the UK – and you will see what I mean. The platform’s stories are highly varied. 

Both in the writing of stories and in how they are engaged with by readers, the platform provides geolocated jumping-off points through which narrative connections can be established. The interface extends your scope from the individual event, the individual thing, person or character, to their significance as part of the wider storied tapestry that we understand as a place. 

A tool for connection 

What3words is a technology with a particular set of characteristics. Firstly, it is a geolocation system that points to 3m x 3m spaces on the earth’s surface. Secondly, this geolocation system uses sets of three words: real words that have existing meanings to people. Thirdly, these word combinations are arbitrary: the words within each 3-word address do not have any intentional link with each other or the location with which they’re associated. 

When adopted for storytelling in Pin the Tale, this system has particular affordances. As writers attempt to bring the geolocated word combinations into a meaningful structure – a narrative – what3words addresses become jumping-off points; inspirational constraints used to reveal and make connections between a wide range of site-specific things. Juxtaposition and playing with perspective are two examples of relational methods that writers use to create unique pieces of storytelling out of the address words. 

Writing, and storytelling in particular, are often said to forge connections between disparate people and contexts. This is their superpower. In its use of the what3words system, Pin the Tale’s interface is designed to centre place as a hotbed of such connections. To show how places allow you to go beyond yourself; to think about all the other lives that have been, are being and will be lived in that locality. 

This article is part of a series focused on how artificial intelligence is being used as a tool for writing for the screen and stage as well as how it is depicted on screen and stage, commissioned as part of MyWorld, a UKRI-funded project that explores the future of creative technology innovation by pioneering new ideas, products and processes in the West of England.

As the hype cloud of this recent AI cycle fades, the job of figuring out how to integrate new workflows into old and what this means for human creativity properly begins. In many ways, writers have most to lose from the technology widely referred to as AI and occasionally prefixed with ‘so-called’. A cursory look at the text-based applications of AI in Higher Education, publishing and particularly marketing explain writers’ hostility towards what many call the 5^th industrial revolution. Writers rightly protest AI’s wholesale adoption, citing accusation of plagiarism, legal inequities, qualities of output and erosion of income streams. While recognising these legitimate concerns, over the past year, during practice-driven research into the affordances and limitations of AI for screenwriting, I have found myself increasingly inspired to write with AI across a wide range of outputs. And I don’t mean pump it for information, book summaries or PowerPoint presentations, or to schedule my day. I mean write. The back and forth of drafting, word choice, syntax, ideation and flow. Everything that goes into making meaning in the written word.

I’ve been looking into ways to harness technology as a writing and storytelling strategy for nearly 10 years. My creative writing doctorate investigated the multimodal languages and practices of social media for creative writing as way of enabling new knowledge around writing contemporary young adult fiction and explored social media’s role in identity formation. So, when in the summer of 2023, Hollywood writers and actors’ unions went on strike to protest against the next disruptive technology to threaten livelihoods, the proximity of our relationship to machines moved a step closer and with very real consequences. Unconvinced by the corporate argument that AI could replace human writers, I devised a research project, funded by the British Academy, to investigate the increasingly blurry line between human and machine writing while providing an opportunity to revisit my filmmaking practice after a 15-year hiatus.

One of my favourite metaphors for thinking about creative ideation, which I often share with my students, comes from David lynch, who famously said, ‘Ideas are like fish. You don’t make the fish you catch the fish. Desiring an idea is like baiting a hook and lowering it into the water.’ My students and I go on to discuss how we make the conditions for ‘catching the fish’/new idea, particular places, activities that inspire us, sensory reflective practices such as journalling, watching, reading, listening etc. whatever moves you into the right state of mind for ‘catching your fish’. This process can take time. Years sometimes. But that’s the point. It’s a process. Not a destination. At least that’s not always the most interesting thing about the thing you’ve made.

So, how is writing with GenAI like catching a fish?

Image credit: ChatGPT 4.0/Sarah Gibson Yates 2025

Well, first, a disclaimer. I am not a fisherperson nor have I ever been a fisherperson, nor do I have any known affiliations with fisherpersons living or dead. My knowledge of fishing is entirely predicated on second hand observations mediated mostly through small screens (Gone Fishing, Monsters, various YouTube videos my husband, also not a fisherperson, insists on watching). But I have spent a lot of time by rivers and stared into their (often murky) depths searching for signs of life. I have also done this with many a blank page. I know there is life/words in there, it’s just sometimes hard to see it/them, let alone catch it/them, or take a trophy photo, or write them down.

This is where AI can be helpful.

AI can help you catch the fish/idea, lurking cruelly just out of sight.

This quote from American writer Joan Didion was stuck on my screen throughout my PhD: ‘I write entirely to find out what I am thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear…’ (Didion 1976, p. 2) It is much quoted among writing circles for good reason as it seems to get to heart of what writing is about and got me through the good times and bad as I struggled to find and land what I wanted to say.

As with all writing, writing with GenAI can help you find what it is that you want to write.  And sometimes it can get you there quicker. It can also help write you out of blank page as this 2023 paper by Iona Gilburt explains.

However, ‘catching ideas’ with AI is not like dropping a line. It is a net. It can help you catch a lot of ideas. Often too many. So, switching from the image of a solitary fisher to a trawler with its oversized and indiscriminate net, the writer will soon realise most of the fish/ideas that you have caught in your (AI) net will need to be thrown back. This takes time, care and a clear sense of what you are looking for. Too big, too small, wrong species all together? These ‘wrong ’uns’ must be ignored, deleted, or re-written into refined prompts adding or subtracting according to how they fail to align, engage, disrupt, reframe or reimagine your initial prompt and according to your intentions as the human in this writing loop, writing for other humans.

So, for me, this is how writing with AI is a bit like catching a fishing when it comes to ideation, and I tend to think of all writing as a form as ideation because from first to final draft the writer is chipping away to land the idea right.

AI can help you write a path toward your idea. By crafting the right prompt and analysing the results and probably writing another 10 or so I often find myself nearer the idea I had on the edge of my vision but don’t yet see full screen. This iterative process, guided by a set of criteria defined by your individual writerly aims and objectives, can be worked any number of ways, depending on what you are writing, how you write, your position as a unique human in a particular body, with a specific set of experiences, in a particular place and time. These mental and physical criteria can incorporate all the myths and science around writing: ‘the muse’, subconscious babblings, the divine, serendipity, improvisation and ideas stolen/adapted from others, and run through your own creative algorithm just as artists have been doing since all time.

For writers used to getting hired and fired within the production systems of Hollywood, the suggestion that AI tools might cheaply churn out scripts for producers wishing to duplicate the story formulas of past successes, felt like a death toll. The widespread belief that a computational system trained on pre-existing data and programmed to recognise story patterns could replace a skilled human with life experience and a nuanced understanding of the complex context in which they write was a B2B conversation. Corporate America talking to itself about how to maximise profit and minimize financial risk while appearing to offer transformative benefits to the workforce in the same breath. Artists were right to ring a clear loud bell of caution, not to mention pessimism as the short-term implications looked harrowing and reflected a wider, longer held belief that threatened to reinforce a historical and persistent devaluation of the writer, or, perhaps more accurately, the processes of writing. Revealing our capitalist economy’s emphasis on product, not process.

Screenwriting is not alone in having to confront these issues. We see them being confronted across many creative disciplines but while other practices and industries have their own issues, the problems for (screen)writing, in this peak of text-based AI and in the face of widespread misbeliefs about what any creative writing actually is, feels particularly pertinent.

‘AI, while impressive, only really excels at a very specific type of writing…and …is only better than people with no particular expertise in writing’ (Lynda Clark, 2022, p. 135).

This is where the writers come in. If we believe, as most writers do, that writing is more than just the accumulation of words on a page, that it is ideological, reflecting and shaping beliefs, systems and values. We must therefore work with AI to show the world that our skills as writers, which lay in staying attentive to how words show our world back to us, are still very much needed in a post truth world saturated with populist rhetoric and misinformation.

In a recent research project I explored creative human machine collaboration in screenwriting and filmmaking within a new context of care that emerged in response to the #metoo movement and climate crisis. In it I built on Clarke’s notion of creativity amplification (Clark 2022) and developed a framework with which to net the right kind of fish/ideas (or at least increase the odds of doing so). I describe The Screenwriting with AI Framework (SWAIF) in more depth elsewhere (Gibson Yates 2025), but to summarise, SWAIF emerged from an initial messy process of devising prompts based on my research questions and aesthetic intentions for the work, assessing the results according to a range of specified criteria, intuition and understanding of context in which the work would sit – and budget (I needed to produce this film after all). It provided a structure to my workflow while preserving the collaborative approach to fostering creative spontaneity and flexibility I was looking for; to enable authentic moments of human-machine intra-action and entangled meaning making.

Importantly, it offered a map to stay on course. It’s easy to lose direction once you start creative writing with AI. You soon find yourself with a large body of ideas, scene draft variation, character profile, different plots, reams of dialogue exchanges all offering different and seemingly viable variations on your story. SWAIF helped me stay on track, serving my research question to explore the intimate and affective spaces created when human and machines intra-act, but also allowing me a generous amount of creative freedom.

Writing with AI will not be for everyone and resistance will no doubt continue, but soon, as AI becomes the default component in all software, the time when it could be hard to write anything (with a digital device) without it soon. Each new wave of tech has its resistors and rightly so, but eventually the evolutionary mantra of adapt or die comes to pass. Reflecting on the history of writing and literature’s historical resistance to technology, from the reluctance to embrace the Word Processor, to debates about whether contemporary media should be referenced in ‘serious’ fiction – from TV in the 80s to the internet in the noughties, I am reminded of an influential essay by the American author David Foster Wallace. In a much cited speech to graduates at Kenyon University, Ohio, in 2005, curiously also featuring fish, he gave this advice on the importance of engaging/staying attentive to the stuff of everyday life that surrounds us:

‘There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’’

This story works on many levels. For myself as a writer observing and trying to work out the best way through the world for myself, for loved ones, for fellow writers, makers, teachers, and for generations who come after us, the idea that we should pay close attention to the stuff we barely notice among the daily stresses and strains of life is important. It many ways it fuels my creative focus and perhaps goes someway to explain why I, for one, will continue to write with AI.

‘Technology enables us to change our vision, and it allows us to change what we do with that vision; where we look, what we see, and how we act as a result’ (James Bridle, 2022, p.138).

AI is already the invisible stuff all around us. Understanding how to work with it, and to some extent the mechanisms and systems that underpin it, can only benefit us. By increasing our knowledge and understanding of the possibilities and limitations of writing with AI we can grow a better understanding of how we can intra-act proactively, creatively, and even with hope.

‘I am sure, that our future as Homo sapiens is a merged future with the AI we are creating. Transhumanism will be the new mixed race’ (Jeanette Winterson, 2021, p.262).

I see working with AI as more than simply a process of figuring out how to use the next tech tool, but rather, as physicist Karen Barad terms, a way to intra-act with it and the other complex life systems via AI applications in life sciences, conservation, climate intervention, all of which are already helping us see anew (and act anew). It is a way to speak directly to our entangled relationship with technology and an opportunity to gain new meaning and insight into the complex interactions of digital and material agents and how they can be harnessed to benefit all of us. Writing with AI is a space for holding ideas about the potential of these posthuman futures, a way to hold them in a space driven by community, care and love.

Acknowledgements:

The research project underpinning the development of this framework, Creative Human-Machine Collaboration: screenwriting a short film screenplay with generative AI and its production within a context of care, was funded by The British Academy Talent Development Award for Early Career Researchers and supported by Anglia Ruskin University. The work was carried out in 2024. Find more information, including the screenplay and watch the film here: www.sarahgibsonyates.net

References/Suggested Reading:

A Little of the Heart (2025) Directed by Sarah Gibson Yates. https://vimeo.com/988573902

Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

Bridle, J. (2022) Ways of Being. Animals, Plants Machines: The search for a planetary intelligence. Penguin.

Clark, Lynda. (2022) ‘Towards “Creativity Amplification”: Or, AI for writers, or beating the system’. Creative Writing in Practice, pp. 134-145, https://www.nawe.co.uk/DB/current-wip-edition-2/articles/x11-towards-creativity-amplification-by-lynda-clark.html

Didion, J. (1976) Why I write. The New York Book Review, vol.22, pp.270.

Foster Wallace, D. (2008) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/sep/20/fiction

Gibson Yates, S. (2025) Creative Human-AI Collaborations in Screenwriting: co-writing a short realist screenplay with generative AI. International Journal of Screenwriting Special Issue on AI issue. Intellect.

Gilburt, I. (2024), A machine in the loop: the peculiar intervention of artificial intelligence in writer’s block. New Writing, Vol. 21. No 1. 26-37.

Heti, S. (2023) According to Alice. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/according-to-alice-fiction-sheila-heti

Ishiguro, K. (2021) Klara and The Sun. Faber.

Lynch. D. (2009-2025) various video interviews including David Lynch’s Secret to Catching ideas like fish, https://youtu.be/vT3Znxzp4h8?si=zM3AWTIy7-hnlNe4, and, David Lynch: Where do ideas come from? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fxr-7O1Bfxg

Silva, H. (2023) My Child, the Algorithm. Footnote.

Winterson, J. (2021) 12 Bytes. How Artificial Intelligence will change the way we live and love. Vintage.

This article is part of a series focused on how artificial intelligence is being used as a tool for writing for the screen and stage as well as how it is depicted on screen and stage, commissioned as part of MyWorld, a UKRI-funded project that explores the future of creative technology innovation by pioneering new ideas, products and processes in the West of England. Rethinking AI Writing as a Living Process

Artificial intelligence has accelerated the automation of writing, raising questions about its vitality. Rather than viewing AI as a tool, this article explores how writing with AI generates new forms of life. Through my experimental project ‘Worship for Adaishe, or Pray for Him’, I introduce the notion of ‘being water’, positioning AI generated writing as an ocean medium where words and symbols flow dynamically within relational milieus.  

In 2022, I participated in an artist-in-residence programme for an art exhibition Thinking Through Ocean at The Topred Centre for Contemporary Art in Xiamen, China. During the field trip, I visited the coastal areas of Fujian and Guangdong provinces. These areas are highly modernised, but traditional culture remains and is practiced throughout everyday life. This inspired me to think about writing with technologies – not just as a representation of culture, but as a medium that organises and curates the movement of symbols and meaning.   

Writing as a Fluid Medium 

The philosopher Irene J. Klavers’ concept of ‘radical water’ challenges the modern tendency to isolate, control and reduce water to H2O. Instead, she emphasises water’s relational nature. Similarly, Melody Jue, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, describes the ocean as, ‘a dynamic milieu whose characteristics manifest by actively moving within it… and through mediated forms of contact’.​vi​ When we apply this to writing, we can see words, not as fixed units, but as fluid, relational entities shaped by their environment.  

During my fieldwork in the coastal areas of South China Sea, I encountered characters and inscriptions that embodied this fluidity. For instance, Figure 1 shows the simplified Chinese character 心 (xin, heart). However, the movement of the central point to the bottom changes its meaning to ‘setting one’s heart at rest.’ Likewise, Figure 2 shows an inscription of the Chinese character 海 (hai, sea) on the pillar of a Mazu temple in Quanzhou, Fujian province, integrating the character for water .氵with the element of field (母), symbolising the intersection of land and water. These examples illustrate how writing functions as an ocean medium, as meaning emerges through movement, relationality and imagination. This suggests an alternative way of thinking about AI-generated writing – not just as a means to an end, but as transforming the qi (气); the energy and force in atmosphere.   

Writing as Mediance.   

French geographer and philosopher Augustin Berque’s concept of mediance offers a non-dualistic understanding of human-environment relations. He describes it as ‘being toward life’ – an eco-techno-symbolic interplay where meaning emerges through interaction.  

In such milieus, trajectivity means ‘things exist according to the way we grasp them through our senses, mind, words and action’.​viii​ Take the example of a Japanese tearoom. The architecture of the tearoom is empty and open to its environment in the woods or gardens. The designer Shunmyo Masuno describes this as a ‘a space of emptiness’, stressing that objects in Japanese gardens change according to seasons.​ix​ These conditions facilitate the circulation of qi, (energy and force). Inspired by the cultural technique of the tearoom, my use of AI generated writing aims to facilitate the movement of words and enables them to circulate among the eco-techno-symbolic milieu of writing.  

During the field trip, I collected unfamiliar words from local cultural practices, which described climate, religious rituals and intangible heritage. These words have a quality of locality in that they are extracted from local cultural milieus and, hence, acquire the quality of those milieus. Accordingly, we grasp the words not from signification, but through our senses. For instance, when sensing the word ‘zhuanggaoren’ (a toy doll made of decorated flour), the character ‘gao’ in it describes the flour, and the character ‘zhuang’ means decoration. This allows me to recall the cultural technique of making the doll.  

AI as a Relational Process  

To explore the relational movement of words, I used InferKit (a GPT-2-based software) to generate text. My method involved; 

• Inputting collected words into InferKit to produce AI-generated text.   

• Selecting phrases that shared a similar quality to the collected words.   

• Reassembling the fragments into coherent narratives.    

For example, I combined the phrase, ‘garden of Indian coral tree’, with the word set; 

S = {red Indian coral tree, monsoon and waves, April and May, Arabian and Persian, olives}  

From this, I generated the passage:  

‘When red Indian coral trees blossom, monsoons and waves drive sailing. In the garden of the Indian Coral tree in April and May, olives from Arabia and Persia grow.’ 

Here, the words coalesce into a new milieu, creating imagery through minimal structure. This method reveals the materiality of AI generated writing and how data, computation and human interpretation interact to shape meaning.    

Writing in Exhibition Contexts 

To display the generated text in an exhibition space, there are three approaches; speculative narrative, diasporic words and localised writing. These approaches produce space in a way where new milieus of writing are created in the material process.  

Based on the generated pieces of text, I fabricated a story about a sailor named Adaishe’s life and death. The exhibition space was divided into four sections. Each section represented each prayer time for Adaishe’s death at a ghost festival and a memory from Adaishe’s life. The introduction depicts a scenario where three family members are grieving Adaishe’s death at a ghost festival. The paper used simulates the texture of joss paper, which is burnt as a way of remembering the dead in China.    

Another section indicates Adaishe’s diasporic life in South-East Asia. Here I used a form of overseas letter; a common way of communicating among diasproic communities in the South China Sea. The AI generated words became data and their discreteness was demonstrated through their algorithmic correlation and abstraction. This suggests a poetic relation in new technological conditions.  

Finally, the last section of the exhibition captures Adaishe’s life on the sea. In this space, a fishing net, a compass and pieces of paper hang on the fishing net. AI generated writing is highlighted in blue, symbolising waves. In this scenario, writing is localised, depicting the protagonist’s life on the sea.   

Reimagining AI Writing as a Living Process 

This article introduces a philosophical study and speculative design of writing with AI, proposing the notion of ‘being water’. Specifically, milieus of words in the production of writing allows AI generated writing to be viewed as facilitating the movement of words and symbols.  

The article began with theories drawn from blue humanities to speculate on writing as an ocean medium through which words and symbols engage with their environment and extract the quality of the milieus. Through experimental writing and exhibition practices, I have demonstrated how AI-generated text can be dispersed, reconfigured and materialised in new milieus. Ultimately, this perspective invites us to rethink AI generated writing, not as an instrument of automation, but as a dynamic, relational practice embedded in cultural and environmental context.   

In this time of rapid technological advancement, the intersection of artificial intelligence and creative practice has become a focal point of academic research within MyWorld, a UKRI-funded project that explores the future of creative technology innovation by pioneering new ideas, products and processes in the West of England. Recognising the importance of this fast-evolving landscape, Bath Spa University’s Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries (CCCI) and the Narrative and Emerging Technologies (NET) Lab commissioned a series of articles exploring the impact of AI on writing and publishing, linked to our recent Writing with Technologies webinar series.  

As we know from our webinar series and our recent MIX conference, writers are living through one of the most transformative periods in literary history. Artificial intelligence is not just changing how we research or edit; it’s fundamentally altering what it means to be a writer. From collaborations with ChatGPT to AI-generated poetry, the boundaries of creative writing are blurring in new, and rapidly developing, ways. 

Whether you are curious, concerned or excited about AI’s potential role across writing and publishing, these ten books may help. Hopefully, they will give you the knowledge to make informed decisions about using AI in your writing and publishing practices, understand the ethical implications and inspire new creative directions. 

1. The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity by Arthur I. Miller (MIT Press, 2020) 

This book makes the complex world of AI creativity accessible to a general reader. Miller argues that computers can already match human creativity and will eventually surpass it but this book is not a dystopian prediction. Instead, Miller celebrates the creative possibilities that emerge when humans and machines collaborate. For writers, this book offers a hopeful vision of AI as a creative partner rather than a replacement. 

2. The Routledge Handbook of AI and Literature by Will Slocombe and Genevieve Liveley (Routledge, 2024) 

This comprehensive academic collection spans from ancient literature to contemporary AI-generated poetry. It is particularly valuable for writers interested in how AI is being used in literary analysis and creative practice. The handbook includes case studies spanning performance, poetry, comics and prose, offering practical insights alongside theoretical perspectives. 

3. Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write by Dennis Tenen (W. W. Norton, 2024) 

This book bridges the gap between literary theory and computational systems, examining how machines have learned to process and generate text. It is particularly valuable for writers who want to understand the literary foundations underlying AI text generation. It traces the evolution from early text processing systems to contemporary large language models (LLMs), showing how traditional literary concepts, such as narrative structure and stylistic analysis inform machine learning approaches to writing. 

4. The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Subject of Blackness by Ramon Amaro (Duke University Press, 2023) 

This book provides a critical examination of how machine learning systems embed and perpetuate racial hierarchies. Amero demonstrates how the technical structures of AI reflects and reinforces anti-Black logics, making this essential reading for writers concerned about the social implications of AI and how the fundamental architecture of machine learning participates in systems of racial oppression. 

5. Does Writing Have a Future? by Vilém Flusser (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) 

Originally written in the 1980s but still relevant today, Flusser’s meditation on the future of writing anticipates many contemporary debates about AI and creativity. He explores how digital technologies might transform not just how we write but what the act of writing means as a human activity. For writers grappling with questions about authenticity and human agency, Flusser provides philosophical frameworks that remain relevant today. 

6. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford (Yale University Press, 2021) 

This book exposes the material infrastructure underlying AI systems, from mineral extraction and data centre construction to exploitative labour practices. For writers using AI in their practice, it provides crucial context about the hidden costs of these technologies. Crawford’s work challenges the myth of AI as an immaterial, neutral technology, revealing instead how these systems are deeply embedded in existing power structures and environmental destruction. 

7. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin (Polity, 2019) 

This groundbreaking work should be required reading for any writer using AI. Benjamin reveals how algorithms can perpetuate and amplify existing inequalities, often while claiming to be neutral. For writers, this raises crucial questions around whether if you use AI trained on biased datasets you inadvertently excluding diverse voices from your work. 

8. Converging Minds: How AI, Human Consciousness and the Internet Are Reshaping Our Reality by Aleksandra Przegalińska (MIT Press, 2021) 

This book examines how the use of AI is changing human consciousness and social interaction. Przegalińska’s work is particularly relevant for writers interested in how AI might be reshaping not just our writing processes but our fundamental ways of thinking and communicating.  

9. Hallucinate This!: An Authorized Autobotography of ChatGPT  by Mark Marino and ChatGPT (Automated Authors, 2023) 

This is a fictional memoir ‘written’ by ChatGPT in collaboration with digital literature scholar Mark Marino. It is simultaneously funny and profound, exploring questions of authorship, creativity and identity through the lens of AI collaboration. For writers curious about experimental approaches to human-AI collaboration, this book demonstrates what’s possible when you embrace the possibilities of working with AI as a creative partner. 

10. Shimmer, Don’t Shake: How Publishing Can Embrace AI  by Nadim Sadek (Forbes Books, 2023) 

This book offers an optimistic and practical guide for writers and publishers navigating AI’s impact on the publishing industry written by an entrepreneur who’s building AI solutions for book marketing. Sadek addresses the core problem every writer knows (that books can struggle to reach readers) and demonstrates how AI can solve matchmaking issues between authors and audiences through psychological profiling and automated marketing, while still preserving human creativity and artistic merit.  

We are still in the early stages of understanding AI’s impact on creative writing. The field is evolving so rapidly that some books published on the subject become outdated before they are published but we hope that these ten recommendations will provide some of the ideas, knowledge and inspiration you will need to navigate whatever comes next. 

In this time of rapid technological advancement, the intersection of artificial intelligence and creative practice has become a focal point of academic research within MyWorld, a UKRI-funded project that explores the future of creative technology innovation by pioneering new ideas, products and processes in the West of England. Recognising the importance of this fast-evolving landscape, Bath Spa University’s Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries (CCCI) and the Narrative and Emerging Technologies (NET) Lab commissioned a series of articles exploring the impact of AI on writing and publishing, linked to our recent Writing with Technologies webinar series.  

The nine contributors featured in this collection of articles are all experts in their fields and offer their perspective on what AI means for writers and publishers and offer their visions of the future.  

The New Interface

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, a Sri Lankan author, data scientist and journalist, challenges our current relationship with AI. He argues that the familiar chat interface, the ‘box that waits for input’, represents one of the most ‘creatively bankrupt ways’ of harnessing AI. Instead, Wijeratne envisions a future where AI becomes invisible infrastructure, deeply embedded within existing creative workflows rather than standing as a replacement collaborator. 

This vision extends beyond writing to encompass music production, game development, and visual arts, where AI would handle technical heavy lifting while creators focus on the ‘more exciting and complex bits.’ It’s an optimistic view that sees AI as augmentation rather than replacement; if we can move beyond what he calls ‘this nightmare hallucination of replacing human labour.’ 

Smash and Grab

James Bradley, an Australian writer and critic presents a far more sobering perspective, framing AI’s impact through the lens of economic disruption and what he terms ‘the largest act of copyright theft in history.’ Drawing parallels to previous tech industry ‘smash and grab’ operations, Bradley argues that generative AI represents an existential threat to creative industries, enabled by the systematic appropriation of creators’ work without compensation. 

His analysis cuts to the heart of a fundamental tension: while AI companies promise to ‘unleash our potential,’ they simultaneously render creative skills economically worthless. Bradley’s stark assessment, that AI is ‘the equivalent of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs’, reflects the fear that ‘close enough’ will prove ‘good enough’ for most consumers, regardless of quality differences. 

My Creative Collaborator

Nadim Sadek, Founder and CEO of Shimmr AI who also writes business and children’s books, provides a detailed account of AI as creative assistant. His examples span conceptualising, researching, logical checking, translation and audiobook production, all while maintaining that ‘I do the writing.’ 

Sadek’s approach attempts to thread the needle between AI utility and creative integrity. He acknowledges his regret surrounding AI’s training methods while arguing for a future system where creators can choose whether their works are available for others to use and negotiate compensation accordingly. 

His practical examples demonstrate AI’s current capabilities while maintaining clear boundaries about creative ownership and human agency in the writing process. 

What AI Can’t Steal From You

Jane Friedman, editor of The Bottom Line publishing industry newsletter with over 25 years in the profession, takes a notably different approach, positioning fear itself as the primary obstacle to productive engagement with AI. Drawing from her experience of having AI-generated books falsely attributed to her, Friedman argues that the technology has become unnecessarily divisive within the writing community. 

Her perspective emphasises practical adaptation over ideological warfare. Friedman encourages writers to move beyond ‘Will it replace me?’ to ‘How can this help me in my purpose?’ She challenges fundamental assumptions about creativity, asking whether we value writing primarily because of the perceived difficulty and suffering involved in its creation. 

Central to her argument is the assertion that AI is ‘not a plagiarism machine’. Instead, she frames current debates as reflecting very human reactions to technological uncertainty. 

Beyond the Binary

Imwen Eke, a play alchemist and creative technologist who has spoken at the UN Geneva Permanent Forum and G20 Rio advocating for the transformative power of play, introduces a different framework, viewing AI through the lens of play and collaborative creativity. Rather than positioning AI as threat or tool, Eke sees it as a ‘mirror and co-creator’ that can teach us new ways of engaging creatively. 

Drawing from her background in game design and interactive experiences, Eke highlights AI’s potential for real-time adaptation and learning. However, she balances this optimism with critical awareness of AI’s embedded biases and the invisible labour that makes these systems possible. Her call to ‘centre play as a method, a mindset and a politics’ offers a unique approach to AI collaboration that emphasises experimentation and discovery. 

AI: Collaborator, Competitor or Cannibal?

Anna Ganley, CEO of the Society of Authors representing over 12,400 writers, illustrators and translators across the UK, frames the discussion in terms of professional sustainability and regulatory necessity. Her perspective highlights the economic pressures already facing authors, for example median incomes for full-time professional authors have fallen by more than 60% since 2006, and positions unregulated generative AI as an accelerant of these trends. 

Ganley’s approach balances recognition of AI’s creative potential with advocacy for stronger copyright protections and industry safeguards. Her vision of hope rests on the belief that ‘humans will still want to connect with other humans’, suggesting that authentic human creativity will retain its value regardless of AI capabilities. 

AI and Symbiotic Creativity

Reham Hosny, an Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, offers a historical perspective, tracing algorithmic creativity from Christopher Strachey’s 1950s love letter generator through contemporary large language models. Her concept of ‘symbiotic creativity’ suggests a more integrated future where human and machine capabilities enhance each other through reciprocal and iterative augmentation. 

This framework moves beyond simple collaboration toward genuine co-evolution, where AI learns from human interactions while humans adapt their creative processes in response to new technological capabilities. Hosny’s academic perspective provides context for understanding current developments as part of a longer trajectory of human-machine creative partnership. 

A Brief History of Writing

Gary Hall and Joanna Zylinska, critical theorists and experimental writers who are founding co-directors of Open Humanities Press, push the conversation furthest from conventional boundaries, arguing that AI’s arrival creates an opportunity to fundamentally re-imagine creative writing and publishing practices. Their critique extends beyond AI to question the liberal humanist assumptions underlying traditional authorship and the romantic genius model of individual creativity. 

Their call for ‘Creative-Writing-As-We-Don’t-Yet-Know-It’ imagines literary forms that transcend current categories, emerging from profound socio-political and technical transitions. This perspective treats AI not as a tool or threat but as a catalyst for entirely new modes of cultural production. 

Themes

Each of our contributors has shared their perspectives on AI’s impact on the future of writing and publishing and we at Bath Spa University have identified several themes that will inform our ongoing research.

The Interface  

Several contributors emphasise that how we interact with AI matters as much as the technology itself. Whether through Wijeratne’s embedded tools, Eke’s play-based approaches or Hall and Zylinska’s radical reimagining, the interface shapes the creative relationship. 

Economic Justice 

Nearly every contributor grapples with questions of compensation, copyright and economic sustainability. Even those most optimistic about AI’s creative potential acknowledge the need for fair systems of recognition, rights and payment. 

Human Agency 

All contributors, regardless of their stance on AI, insist on maintaining human agency in the creative process. The debate centres not on whether humans will remain involved but on how that involvement should be structured and protected. 

Fear or Curiosity? 

The articles reveal a fundamental divide between those who see fear as an obstacle to productive engagement and those who view current concerns as entirely justified. 

Looking Forward 

These perspectives collectively suggest that the impact of AI on writing and publishing is far from settled. Its impact will depend not only on technical developments but on the social, economic and cultural frameworks we construct around it. The most compelling vision may come from synthesising these approaches; embracing AI’s creative potential while building fair systems for protecting authors’ rights; encouraging experimentation while maintaining critical awareness of embedded biases and remaining open to radical new forms of writing while not losing our creativity. 

This article by author, data scientist and journalist Yudhanjaya Wijeratne is one of a series commissioned as part of MyWorld, a UKRI-funded project that explores the future of creative technology innovation by pioneering new ideas, products and processes in the West of England. We have commissioned writers, academics, creators and makers to contribute a written snapshot into how artificial intelligence is changing, enhancing and challenging creative writing and publishing practices.  

The dominant form that AI takes in public perception is the chat interface. Think of ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude; a box patiently waits for input and responds to you. 

AI has had a bumbling, confusing and hostile time in the creative world. And I think that’s because of this interface we’ve defaulted to: replacing a friend on the other side of a connection. While the chat interface is intuitive to us, shaped as we are by decades of SMS, internet messaging and so on, it’s also one of the most creatively bankrupt ways of harnessing what is essentially an artificial mind.

I think we are slowly getting past this wave, this introduction. The real utility for creative work will come from AI deeply embedded within the tools and workflows that we already use.

We are now seeing the rise of more invisible or integrated AI tools. One of the most successful examples actually comes from the field of software engineering.  Klein, Roo Code, Copilot – tools, augments, that essentially fit within the same developer experience, the same interface that programmers use to write code, but framed as an agent or pair programmer that is willing to read your codebase for you and explain something, or to add a few lines here and there, or to finish out that boilerplate section while you handle the more exciting and complex bits. ChatGPT is no replacement for a skilled software engineer, but we’re seeing widespread adoption at all levels of this plugged-in agent, a specialized thing lurking in the background ready to assist rather than replace. 

In a similar fashion, consider Adobe integrating tools into the existing Photoshop interface, or of the endless integration that Google is pushing – where the Gemini models, it seems, are always lurking in the background, ready to jump out and write that email for you or to generate imagery for your slide deck. 

While I do admit that Google is perhaps more of a jump-scare than an assistant, I think what’s good about this is that we are now moving towards task-specific competence, built in a way that it can integrate into how people already work. Let’s look at what might emerge in a few specific domains:

In writing: I expect that people would start building systems that bundle word processing with AI tools that would help authors keep track of complex plots. Helping track character arcs across long series, figuring out elements of world building from notes, building structured, searchable notes and wikis as you go along, if you will; that will be such a tremendous utility for authors. 

In game development: imagine tools that let writers and game designers create characters and let them loose with their own motivations and agendas, able to navigate a gameworld in much the same way a player can. There are interesting demos, such as NVIDIA/Inworld’s Covert Protocol; but I think it’ll hit usability when it starts becoming part and parcel of the game engines that are already popular. Similarly, I also expect tools that will simplify the process of going from concept art to 3D object; I expect AI playtesting and QA to be a thing, in much the same way that automated testing became a huge part of the software development process.

In music, I expect tools that can generate musical phrases, harmonies, which musicians can then edit, arrange, and build upon; tools that can analyze a mix and suggest or automatically apply mastering processes, or help balance individual tracks within a complex audio project; AI that can generate unique sound effects based on descriptive prompts or by combining and morphing existing sounds, offering a palette of new sonic possibilities for filmmakers and game designers.

Granted, not everything happens the way I want to. The low-hanging fruit, like the chat interface, is everywhere. In writing, this manifests as endless promises to rewrite your “content” or generate stories from a prompt. Tools exist to replace concept artists altogether, or to replace voice actors with dialogue systems, or to generate songs from whole cloth. 

A charitable reading is that the world of artificial intelligence will  – at least on some level – wake up from this nightmare hallucination of replacing human labor and move back to the much more sensible approach of augmenting what we already do. At least, that’s my belief: the interface will be the creative process itself and we can kick the stupid chat box down to where it belongs – as the simplest, most hostile facet of AI.

This article by writer and critic James Bradley is one of a series commissioned as part of MyWorld, a UKRI-funded project that explores the future of creative technology innovation by pioneering new ideas, products and processes in the West of England. We have commissioned writers, academics, creators and makers to contribute a written snapshot into how artificial intelligence is changing, enhancing and challenging creative writing and publishing practices.  

“Which is it?” Joshua Rothman asked recently. “Business as usual or the end of the world?”

Rothman’s question was directed at the divergent visions of the future of artificial intelligence emanating from the tech industry and whether we’re on the brink of creating superintelligent systems that we will be unable to control, or simply witnessing the messy birth pains of new technologies that will eventually be incorporated into our lives in the same way as the telephone, television and the internet have been.

Writers and other creatives face a similar question. Is generative AI a new step in the ongoing democratization of creativity unleashed by technology, or has it made our skills obsolete?

The answer matters. In the less-than-three years since Sam Altman launched ChatGPT, generative AI systems have developed at dizzying speed. The clumsy poems and bland business communications produced by their early iterations have rapidly given way to an ability to create written and visual material that is, if not indistinguishable from the content produced by a human being, then remarkably close. Meanwhile individuals and organisations have incorporated it into their workflows and businesses, increasing insecurity in already highly precarious industries.

I might be kidding myself, but I think you can usually tell when a piece of writing has been produced by AI. As anybody who has spent time with them knows, most AI systems are essentially incredibly fluent bullshitters. I recently had a completely surreal conversation with ChatGPT in which it described in detail the plot of one of my novels, producing quotations and even writing a couple of essays about it, until I interrupted it by noting that the novel it was describing didn’t exist (“You’re completely right, and I appreciate your attention to detail,” it replied, as if its fabulations were simply a hiccough).

But even when they’re not making shit up or busily saying nothing three different ways it often seems possible to detect a blandness and weightlessness to a lot of AI-generated text. It’s a tone that’s already ubiquitous online, where AI-generated content is metastasizing across platforms in an attempt to capture clicks and eyeballs by gaming the algorithm.

It’s quite possible that I’m fooling myself, and the ersatz quality I think I can detect in AI-generated text is entirely imaginary. Because in the end it doesn’t really matter. The weirdness of AI-generated content is already being normalised in the same way the uncanniness of photography was metabolised by the culture of the 19^th century, and any residual disparity between human and machine-generated content will likely disappear sooner rather than later: most people already can’t tell the difference between machine-generated poetry and real poetry and the short stories ChatGPT can spit out are better than most creative writing students can produce.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, what’s needed is a reframing of what it is we think matters about human creativity, a focus not on what is produced, but on the creative labour it involves. What matters about the things we make isn’t the things themselves, but the making of them. It’s that process, that interplay between body, mind and world, that brings new understandings into being, that changes us and allows us to see things in new ways. Handing that process over to a machine leaves us poorer and diminishes us in some essential way.

An emphasis upon labour also has the advantage of focusing our minds on the economic dimension of AI rather than nebulous questions of aesthetic value. Because these technologies are designed to replace human workers. Forget the tech industry’s blandishments about unleashing our potential, for those of us in the creative industries they are the equivalent of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Why pay writers and editors if you can get a machine to do it for free? Perhaps the work the produce won’t be as hit the high notes a real writer might, but if we’ve learned anything over the past 20 years, it’s that people don’t actually care whether content is good, they care about whether it’s free. If good writing had some intrinsic value the media sector wouldn’t have collapsed. Close enough, in other words, is good enough.

For creators the really offensive part of this dynamic is that the destruction of our industries is being enabled by the largest act of copyright theft in history, as tech companies feed billions of words of our work into their machines for free. And that act of theft isn’t accidental: not only do they know what they’re doing is illegal, they’re now using their access to power to remove any obstacles to their intellectual land grab, resulting in the sacking of the United States’ copyright czar over a report critical of the tech industry’s assault on intellectual property rights, attempts to exempt AI companies from copyright rules, and outlawing attempts to regulate the industry.

It’s a strategy the tech industry has used many times before: from the music business to Elon Musk’s assault on the US Government, when the broligarchs talk about moving fast and breaking things what they’re usually talking about is a smash and grab in which they enclose public assets and strip-mine industries for their own benefit.

So, the end of the world or just business as usual? The answer, of course, is both of the above. The arrival of generative AI will is already profoundly reshaping the creative economy, rendering the skills many of us have spent lifetimes developing effectively worthless. But this assault on our industry is also part of a much larger story about the consolidation of wealth and economic control in the hands of the super-rich, and of the transformation of human value into data capable of being extracted and commodified.

Resisting this process is not impossible. We need to insist that the rights of artists and other creators are privileged over the profits of the tech industry. Governments must be compelled to  create regulatory systems that compensate creators for the use of their work, and sanction tech companies when they do not. But perhaps more deeply again, we need to rethink the relationship between human value and profit, and privilege human flourishing over extraction and accumulation.

2 July 2025, 09:00 – 18:00 at Bath Spa University’s Locksbrook Campus, Bath, UK

Now in its eighth year, Bath Spa University’s MIX conference has established itself as an innovative forum for the discussion and exploration of writing and technology, bringing together researchers, writers, technologists and practitioners from around the world to make, think and talk. After our unique collaboration with the British Library in 2023, MIX 2025 will be hosted in the beautiful city of Bath at Bath Spa University’s Locksbrook Campus.  

This year, we are focusing our attention on issues of trust and truth in digital writing, the use of generative AI by writers, AI and ethics and immersive storytelling. Expect talks from practitioners and academics and in-depth conversations about the rapidly evolving mediated creative writing landscape.   

We are pleased to welcome Nadim Sadek, Founder and CEO of Shimmr AI as our keynote speaker as part of our programme.   

MIX is situated within Bath Spa University’s world-class Creative Writing department within the School of Writing, Publishing and Humanities, as well as the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, which also co-hosts the online magazine of writing and technology, The Writing Platform. MIX 2025 is part of the UKRI-funded MyWorld programme, which explores the future of creative technology innovation by pioneering new ideas, products and processes 

Book your ticket (£25-£45) now.  

This article by Nadim Sadek, author and Founder & CEO of Shimmr AI, is one of a series commissioned as part of MyWorld, a UKRI-funded project that explores the future of creative technology innovation by pioneering new ideas, products and processes in the West of England. We have commissioned writers, academics, creators and makers to contribute a written snapshot into how artificial intelligence is changing, enhancing and challenging creative writing and publishing practices.  

Wearing two hats – one as CEO of an AI company, the other as a writer of business and children’s books – sometimes gives me whiplash. The friction lies in copyright. AI is brilliant and here to stay. But its training methods, built on the misappropriation of creators’ work, are a source of deep regret. So let me begin this article by saying two things.

First, I believe all creators should be properly recognised and remunerated for their work. My own view is that a simple, global technology-enabled system should be produced, by which creators (or their Rights-holders) can choose whether their works are available for others (like AI companies) to use and they should be able to negotiate the value of those works within that platform. Second, I believe that getting AI to produce ‘creative writing’ is one of its worst use-cases and it’s largely a waste of our time and attention to do so.

Now I wish to be positive. There are so many ways in which AI helps me as an author.

Conceptualising. I day-dream. That’s normally where my stories arise. Somehow, a thought becomes a theme that becomes a concept. Eventually, I execute on by beginning to write it down and iterate it and re-iterate it, gradually labouring my way towards a manuscript with which I’m satisfied. Nowadays, I use AI to discuss the theme and concept. I might have a thought about children’s stories involving bicycles and dogs. I share my thoughts. AI does what I ask it to do – has this been done before? What sort of age might this suit? In the narrative arc, where do the tensions and releases seem to be? Does it seem terribly bland? Have I inadvertently made the female character a little recessive? AI helps me to shape my thoughts. I do the writing.

Researching. In one of my stories, a cobra bites the hero-dog. After writing the episode, I realised that I didn’t really know how a human can intervene to stop the bite being a lethal attack. AI helped me to understand how the venom affects a dog and what interactions might mitigate the situation, saving the dog’s life. AI helped me understand the biology. I did the writing.

Arguing. I produce a monthly column for The Bookseller. My v1 is normally not far from my final draft, but I tend to sleep on it and address a few repetitions or clumsy phrases with the freshness of a new day. Nowadays, when I’m satisfied with my v2, I check in with AI, asking if the article makes sense, or where my logic or narrative might have gone awry. Almost without fail, AI helps me to see where my intended points might be misapprehended, or where I’m not helping the reader. AI helps me think more clearly. I do the writing.

Translation. My business book has a limited audience. It’s about how publishing can embrace AI. Released in English, I anticipated my audience would largely be publishing professionals in the UK, USA and other English-speaking markets. Meeting other-language publishers at Book Fairs, I discovered an appetite to publish my book, but a baulking at the time and cost of translating what is something of an esoteric book. With AI, my book has now been translated and is published (or soon will be) in Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish, Greek, Tamil, Hindi and others – making it available to more than half the world’s readers. My publishers report that the AI draft only needs a couple of days of editors’ time to ‘polish it’. I think this works when conceptual communication is key, rather than where the art is in the articulation, as in literary fiction. AI helps me disseminate. I do the writing.

Audio-Books. That same business book is now available as an English audio-book. I went into a studio, read three of its ten chapters, and permitted my voice to be cloned. Hey presto, my whole book, read in my voice with my intonation and style, is available on all platforms. My Greek publisher is about to use my voice for a Greek rendition. AI has made me more accessible. I did the writing.

So far, I’ve shared my thoughts as an author. As a publisher, AI can help to qualify manuscripts better so editors can attend to the rubies in the rubble, can help logistics to create a more sustainable industry, can help lawyers to manage rights and royalties more consistently and swiftly, and help list-managers to ensure their meta-data is always up-to-date to take advantage of emerging trends. My own company, Shimmr AI, produces autonomous advertising, helping bring books into the light by understanding the author’s intent, generating advertising that manifests that, and then matching the book to audiences pre-disposed to its unique BookDNA through various media channels.

There are myriad ways in which AI benefits publishing. Let it help you. You do the writing.

This article by Jane Friedman, editor of The Bottom Line, the essential publishing industry newsletter for authors, is one of a series commissioned as part of MyWorld, a UKRI-funded project that explores the future of creative technology innovation by pioneering new ideas, products and processes in the West of England. We have commissioned writers, academics, creators and makers to contribute a written snapshot into how artificial intelligence is changing, enhancing and challenging creative writing and publishing practices.  

Before anyone was taking AI all that seriously in the writing and publishing community, someone used AI to brazenly write and publish half a dozen books for writers with my name on them. As frustrating as that experience was—and as much as it forecast some of the worst abuses of AI in the publishing community today—this activity doesn’t really threaten writers as much as something else that has emerged. And that is writers’ own fears about what AI means for their future. 

I have not witnessed a more divisive topic in my 25-plus years in the profession. I see writers, agents, and insiders alike crusade against people who use AI, promote AI, or express neutrality on the matter. Nuanced conversations have become scarce—and forget about expressing joy or curiosity. The technology is supposed to disturb you at minimum, or be demonized for perpetrating harm against creators (or the culture, or the environment, or any other thing humans ought to value more than they do). God forbid anyone express that AI might be a gift, a near miraculous, not-quite-sure-how-it-works machine that guilelessly attempts to analyze and interpret the archive of human existence, then serve it back to us for sometimes humble ends (can you help me write a loving note to my spouse to make them feel appreciated?) and weightier endeavors (what is the meaning of my life if AI can competently do what I do?). 

People new to using AI, and that includes myself, will regularly test it on their own realm of knowledge to see if they can be replaced. It’s natural. I suggest everyone do it—get it out of your system. Find ways to ridicule AI and make yourself feel superior. Then work your way beyond “Will it replace me?” to “How can this help me in my purpose?” 

The technology can be put to work for low purposes and high purposes. It can push work to be better, it can cheapen work. The machine needs a prompt, a partner; it needs to be guided with the touch of someone who in fact has a vision. Despite all accusations to the contrary, AI is not a plagiarism machine (one of the most fundamental misunderstandings of the technology I continue to hear), and years from now we’ll look back on this as the very human reaction to what we don’t understand. 

AI’s implications will not be truly understood any time soon. Right now we exist in the mess of contradictory claims: doomerism and boosterism. We forget, every time, nothing is all good or all bad. Politely disregard anyone who says they have the answers. Right now we are living the questions and the questions are all-consuming. 

• If a human writer uses AI to generate ideas or generate words, why is that a problem, if they’re still acting as the ultimate god over their story? 

• If a writer wants to mimic the style of a well-known writer then put their own name on the results, is that illegal and/or unethical or is it illegal and/or unethical only when AI is involved? 

• If the writing comes too easily because of AI, is that a problem? Are we damaging ourselves? 

• Have we valued writing all this time because of the perceived difficulty, because of writers’ blood, sweat, and tears? How much do we value something because of the suffering that went into it? 

• If a writer tells us they were struck by inspiration and wrote the whole work down in a fever dream of a few sessions without editing, we accept that. Do we not accept that creativity has many more forms than just the ones we’re acquainted with? 

• Should we police how other people get their work done if they’re not breaking the law? 

• What makes a work human in the end? When does work cross a line from AI generated to human created and owned? 

The absence of open conversation creates barriers to progress and delays more intelligent use of a technology that can’t be stopped. 

I know what writers fear. They fear that their suffering has been in vain. They fear increased competition by people who are getting away with less work. They fear being cut out of the game by publishers, platforms, and unethical actors who will use technology to displace them. They fear their genius has been stolen for and by the machine and handed to others who will use it cheaply. They fear the opportunity to achieve their dreams is slipping through their fingers. They fear lack of purpose. 

Those who recognize their fear for what it is, and proceed with a purpose that is not changed or affected by AI, they will find a way forward, whether they use the technology or not.