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 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.