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.

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. 

This article by Imwen Eke, play alchemist, creative technologist, facilitator, educator and TEDx speaker, 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.  

AI is often framed as a threat or a tool. Something that will either take over our jobs or help us work faster. But what if we shift the lens entirely? What if AI isn’t just here to assist us in writing stories, but to help us learn how to play again?

We are in the eye of a massive shift. AI is changing how we write, play and imagine. Rather than see it as a threat to creativity, I see it as a mirror and a co-creator. In my work as a play alchemist and facilitator, I don’t separate writing from play. Writing in games isn’t always words and narrative, it’s systems, mechanics and the emotions we design for players to feel, recognise and understand. AI, too, is a system that learns through interaction, through data, through inputs, through play. And that has radical implications.

In 2019, AI Dungeon made headlines for allowing players to co-create text adventures in real-time. But beneath the thrill of infinite storytelling, something unexpected emerged. The AI wasn’t just following instructions, it was inventing its own logic, leading to highly offensive and harmful narratives including sexual assault and child abuse themes. Players weren’t just playing the game. They were co-writing it, training the AI. Their human choices became data, the AI echoed back not only the stories players wanted but also their biases, fears and desires, exposing the risks when left unchecked. It raised critical questions: who shapes these narratives? Who is responsible for what emerges?

That’s the paradox: AI learns with us, in real-time. Like a child navigating a playground for the first time, it imitates, adapts and evolves. But what it learns depends on what we teach it, consciously or not.

What excites me isn’t AI as a replacement for writers or designers, but as a co-creative partner. Imagine AI that could recognise group dynamics in physical space, support facilitators in shaping inclusive play environments, or adapt in real-time to how people move, speak, hesitate, lead or follow.

In my game, Cognition, an interactive voting game recently featured at the G20 in Brazil, players traverse real world ethical dilemmas through social cognition, experiencing the weight of ethics, empathy, and personal values and how these influence collective decision-making becoming vehicles for understanding power, advocacy and dissent. Imagine AI that could support this kind of embodied storytelling, learning the nuances of collective movement and ethical decision-making through play.

This is not about tech optimism or tech fear. It’s about tech literacy and play literacy. Play is how we explore the world, test possibilities, and learn. AI is inherently generative, but so are we. We’re both learning to learn with each other.

AI is reintroducing us to the mechanics of play: trial and error, rule-bending, discovery, co-authorship. This isn’t about automation, it’s about the return of improvisation, expanding how we co-create meaning through interaction and play. But we must remain critically aware: AI is not neutral. It’s trained on datasets shaped by human bias and built upon invisible labor, low-wage workers tagging datasets and infrastructures that carry environmental and ethical costs. We can’t be enchanted by “the cloud” without acknowledging the bodies and resources that make it possible. We need more creators, designers and data scientists from historically excluded groups guiding this evolution because AI isn’t just a technical tool, it’s a cultural one.

As we design with AI, I believe the most radical act is to centre play as a method, a mindset and a politics. Not just writing dialogue but designing systems where stories emerge dynamically.

So I’ll leave you with a provocation. What if AI’s greatest gift isn’t what it can create but how it teaches us to play differently?

This article by Anna Ganley, CEO of the Society of 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.  

Authors are innovators. Many writers are using artificial intelligence tools for creative prompts in their work, to spark their imagination, to save time on research, and to assist with administrative processes.  

In this respect, generative AI is a virtual collaborator, an assistive tool that helps to augment human creativity, a tool which is being used by some authors as an exciting partner in creativity.  

Award-winning writer and member of the Society of Authors, Hannah Silva is one such writer who is confronting big ideas through innovation and a playful approach to language and technology. Their book, My Child, the Algorithm (Footnote Press UK/Softskull Press North America), weaves memoir and fiction through conversations with a toddler and an early open source language model, exploring queer single parenting and love. As a result of their success, it was named one of Granta’s Books of the Year 2023.  

Yet, there is a real concern among authors that AI-generated outputs will flood the market and cannibalise their book sales. To mitigate these risks, safeguards need to be implemented and existing regulation needs to be respected and strengthened.  

While some may view AI as a competitive threat, authors are not against AI per se. What they oppose is the use of their copyright-protected work being used without permission or payment by companies such as Meta, which has allegedly used 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers that have been illegally uploaded to the online shadow library Library Genesis, to train its AI model, Llama.  

Copyright infringement aside, creators need to be part of this technological transformation, working with government and tech companies for mandatory transparency, clear labelling and clarity on the copyright position when AI is used in creative works. 

UK Government is currently grappling with these issues with the aim of supporting the creative industries (one of its eight growth sectors in its Modern Industrial Strategy) whilst also championing the development and implementation of AI. Without safeguards in place, AI is more likely to cannibalise authors’ livelihoods. When tech companies do not respect copyright, and use protected materials to train their language models without permission or payment, authors lose out.  

Author incomes have been falling for decades. The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society’s most recent survey into authors’ earnings showed that the median income of a full-time professional author had fallen by more than 60% in real terms since 2006. That report was published back in 2022 – before the impact of AI had even begun to take hold.  

In January 2025, we surveyed our 12,400+ members. The responses provided invaluable evidence and reinforced the points made in our submission to government about the irremediable damage that unregulated AI is having on authors’ ability to sustain a living income.  

But I will end with a vision of hope: no matter how sophisticated these large language models become, my view is that humans will still want to connect with other humans.  

Artificial intelligence is going to improve our lives in myriad ways, and as a creative collaborator, there are gains to be made, but will AI do our creative work entirely? I think not.  

Creativity brings us joy and improves our wellbeing. As humans, we care about what other humans think, feel and create. The Society of Authors exists to promote, protect and support authors of all kinds, and we will continue to celebrate the power of books made by humans. If we lose human creativity, we risk the loss of our empathy, of critical thinking and of our shared humanity. We must hold on to that. 

This article by Reham Hosny 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.  

In the early stages of algorithmic creative writing, Christopher Strachey‘s love letter generator, developed in the 1950s using the first general-purpose electronic computer Ferranti Mark 1, stands as a pioneering effort. This early endeavour marked the genesis of a transformative journey that has unfolded through subsequent decades, shaping the landscape of creative expression in the era of artificial intelligence (AI). 

 Strachey’s experiment utilised constrained structures derived from poetic forms as templates for the algorithms. The concept of predefined structural constraints gained further traction in the 1960s with the French experimental school Oulipo, which sought to explore novel forms of algorithmic writing. A significant paradigm shift occurred with recent Large Language Models (LLMs), which, through extensive training on diverse datasets, can generate creative content in response to human language prompts. This transformation marks a departure from predefined constrained structures governed by specific algorithms for producing certain literary genres and patterns. Instead, contemporary AI generators can produce a myriad of patterns and genres, drawing from huge training on millions of datasets.  

The extensive integration of AI in creative expression, alongside the public and widespread use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Bard, has sparked a significant discourse on the ethical considerations, challenges, and potentials inherent in AI-driven creative expression. This debate encompasses concerns about originality, authenticity, copyright, and authorship. This discussion also prompts reflection on the ethical implications of potential biases embedded in AI algorithms, raising questions about fairness and representation in the narratives generated. Additionally, the commodification of AI-generated content and its impact on the economic value of creative works introduces further ethical considerations, questioning the equitable distribution of profits and recognition within the creative industry. 

Moreover, as AI continues to evolve, a burgeoning exploration into the nature of creativity and the roles of active agents within AI-based creative processes has emerged. Conceptually, creativity as the capacity to generate innovative ideas and connect seemingly disparate thoughts evolves into a novel paradigm of “symbiotic creativity” when considered in the AI environment. Global projects are being currently developed to empower machines to understand and learn human aesthetics rather than imitating artwork crafted by humans. This kind of symbiotic creativity originates from the reciprocal and iterative augmentation between human and algorithmic potential, representing a dynamic evolution in creative collaboration.  

 The operational principle of AI generative models relies on learning from accumulated human interactions to emulate human-like responses in analogous scenarios. This reciprocal exchange enhances the sophistication of responses, qualifying AI as a proficient collaborator. In examining the mutual relationship between artificial intelligence and its context, N. Katherine Hayles introduces the metaphor of “Technosymbiosis” to argue that the act of meaning-making is not exclusive to humans; machines autonomously engage in this process within computational frameworks. “The feedback and feedforward loops” that enhance the symbiotic evolution of AI and humans, as perceived by Hayles, provide innovative opportunities for creativity in its new AI-assisted manifestation.   

Harnessing artificial creative capabilities, such as algorithmic generation and pattern recognition, in conjunction with human intuition, emotional depth, and subjective judgment, extends the scope and profundity of creative writing. Literary chatbots exemplify this synergy, pushing the boundaries of creative expression. Within the realm of AI applications, literary chatbots can seamlessly integrate into interactive storytelling experiences, allowing human participants to shape the narrative through consequential choices. Some literary chatbots are specifically designed for collaborative story or poem creation, where users contribute prompts or ideas, prompting the chatbot to generate narrative elements and creative content in response. Furthermore, writers can utilise these chatbots to delve into character exploration, plot development, and the cultivation of new creative concepts. The interactive fiction piece Galatea (2000) by Emily Short and the interactive drama Façade (2005) by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern are two significant examples of early born-digital “bot” literature curated by the Electronic Literature Organization. 

Engaging in the discourse on the intersection of AI and creativity presents both challenges and opportunities. At this pivotal juncture, as AI becomes increasingly viable, accessible, and entrenched in platforms, it is crucial to investigate the potential for symbiotic creativity between AI and humans, fostering collaborative pathways rather than posing threats to our intertwined futures. 

This article 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.  

What forms will literature and creative writing take ‘after AI’? And what will happen to the book? Will it survive as a medium? Or, like the Sony Walkman and Nokia mobile phone before it, will the printed codex move into obsolete retro-mode, having been replaced by functional iterations of itself in different states of mutation?  

 Stories about the end of the book and the death of human creativity are of course nothing new. However, such semi-apocalyptic narratives have taken on an additional urgency in the age of machine learning technologies, especially in their ‘generative AI’ guise. Rather than join in with the general lamentations, could we view the current period of transition from Gutenberg to Zuckerberg – and, with it, from human meaning and interpretation to computational pattern recognition – very differently: as providing an opportunity to radically remake our creative writing and publishing practices? 

There are good reasons for taking such an opportunity, even if AI does feel like an unwelcome arrival in many respects. Building on the work of thinkers as diverse as Walter Benjamin and Jessica Pressman, the printed book can be viewed as both a symbolic embodiment of, and stand-in for, liberal humanism (Benjamin, 1955/1973). Moreover, it’s a liberal humanism that reproduces the values of well-off, Euro-Western white men (Hall, 2024). Now that the public release of ChatGPT has issues a serious challenge to the creative writing game, is this not an opportune moment to explore the development of new, non-liberal and non-humanist modes of composing and circulating literature?  

 The time certainly seems right to reimagine how we compose, publish and protect our writing: not just the conventional print-on-paper book, but also the idea of the named individual author as both romantic genius and sovereign, proprietorial subject that underpins it – and even the very concept of the human as a stand-alone agent of thought and action. Writing in 2022, the avant-garde novelist Ali Smith presents the modern period of transition as having resulted in Katherine Mansfield’s revolutionising of the short story form and Virginia Woolf’s experimental restructuring of the novel. Smith then questions whether contemporary fiction writers are being prompted by Brexit, the Covid pandemic, and the invasion of Ukraine to craft their own ‘literary transfigurations’ (Smith, 2022). Somewhat oddly, Smith appears less preoccupied with changes in media technology and their transformative impact. Considered together, however, do such profound socio-political and technical transitions not pave the way for a new revolution in writing and publishing? Might they not lead to the invention of literary forms that are distinct from both the modern short story and the novel, irrespective of how experimental they may be? Is the time ripe for creating Creative-Writing-As-We-Don’t-Yet-Know-It? 

The tone of this piece may sound speculative. But the propositions and desires it articulates arise out of a long-term practice on our part of radically remaking writing and publishing, across different media, in response to the technical conditions of the day. Our projects include setting up a non-profit publishing collective (Open Humanities Press); running a Living Books about Life series in which books are open to collective rewriting and reediting; redesigning a coffee table photobook as an online experience (Photomediations Open Book); and engaging in a theory-performance of a pirate philosophy. Some of our more recent experiments with AI, meanwhile, involve exploring the labour issues behind machine learning, and remaking Chris Marker’s science-fiction film La Jetée in collaboration with AI models. 

Our projects have always operated according to the principles of the ‘gift economy’. It’s in this spirit that we offer this brief history as a gift to the creative writing and publishing community. We end with an exhortation: today, in the era of AI, the author must no longer create literature; today the author must create creation (Schöffer in Zylinska, 2020).

References

Benjamin, Walter. 1955/1973. ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. London: Fontana. 

Hall, Gary. 2024, forthcoming. ‘Culture and the University as White, Male, Liberal Humanist, Public Space’. New Formations, special issue on Public Knowledge: The Academy and Beyond.

Smith, Ali. 2022. ‘“The Novel Can’t Just Leave the War Out”: Ali Smith On Fiction in Times of Crisis’. The Guardian, March 26, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/mar/26/the-novel-cant-just-leave-the-war-out-ali-smith-on-fiction-in-times-of-crisis

Zylinska, Joanna. 2020. AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams. London: Open Humanities Press, 57.