Talk: AI Creative Writing & Art Anthology Second Edition

Geoff Davis introduces a discussion of AI in creative writing and visual art, foregrounding authorship, artistic control and changing tools. Ana Maria Caballero presents City Life, a poem arising from grief and a funeral, paired with AI-generated imagery. She describes writing software as a talkative thesaurus that suggests possibilities, clarifies unwanted directions and stimulates her own decisions. Patrick Lichty explores speculative fiction through faulty speech transcriptions and generated continuations, framing incoherent passages and repetitive hallucinations within stories about memory archives and multiversal experiments. He values glitches while questioning whether collaboration accurately describes interaction with complex procedural tools. James Bloom examines digital identity through neural-network transformations of game imagery. His profile-picture works merge figures with unfamiliar environments, using artefacts, manual tracing and subtle animated changes to explore fragmentation, perception and memory. Johnny Dean Mann demonstrates Slow Gods, transforming Nietzschean aphorisms through iterative rewriting before illustrating lines with deliberately constrained image generation. Slowly changing GIFs recast illuminated manuscripts for digital viewing. Discussion considers human selection, editing and conceptual framing, alongside older experimental practices such as cut-ups and concrete poetry. Participants debate machine intelligence, latent space, metaphor, environmental costs and the appeal of imperfect models, repeatedly returning to responsibility for the resulting work.

AI Generated Summary