First Encounters with AI
Writers on Writing
A fascinating look at the future of creative writing
Description
First Encounters with AI gathers some of today’s most original literary minds to explore one of the central artistic and cultural questions of our era: What happens to writing when language is no longer used only by humans? As large language models enter the public imagination and everyday creative practice, writers across genres—novelists, poets, screenwriters, essayists, translators, scholars, technologists, language artists—are grappling with profound shifts in how stories are conceived, crafted, and shared.
Allison Parrish, Ted Chiang, Annelyse Gelman, Sasha Stiles, James Yu, Hannes Bajohr, Ken Liu, Qiufan Chen, Joseph Dumit, Gerardo Con Diaz, Iain S. Thomas, Sheila Heti, Nicholas Nardini, Jasmin B. Frelih, Katy Ilonka Gero, and Alex Saum-Pascual reflect on their early, intimate encounters with generative text at a moment when artificial intelligence feels at once thrilling, unsettling, and unavoidable. Their essays portray AI not as a monolith, but as a dynamic field of possibility and tension between creativity and computation, where longstanding human questions about intention, desire, authorship, labor, and value gain new urgency. Ranging from deeply personal meditations to critical provocations, from philosophical investigations to playful experiments, these writers reveal how writing tools shape writing itself—and what is at stake when those tools begin to imitate us. Curated and introduced by editor Nina Beguš, First Encounters with AI offers readers an essential guide to navigating this new literary landscape. Together, these essays map the terrain of our first contact zone with AI, offering clarity, insight, and imaginative depth at a moment of radical change.
Nina Beguš is Researcher and Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI.
Reviews
“Nina Beguš has assembled an essential collection of essays about the impact of AI on writers’ own understandings of artistry and craft. First Encounters with AI avoids polemic in favor of richly nuanced discussions of generative AI by writers who have used the technology or are deeply familiar with its history and ongoing development. Anyone who reads this collection will come away with a sharper understanding of not only AI, but also aesthetic judgment, literary form, and the meaning of meaning.”
- Aarthi Vadde, author of We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature
“Every first encounter mission sends an expedition, and there is always a linguist on the team. This encounter is made entirely of language. So Beguš sent nothing but linguists, poets, people intimate with the word, Bajohr on the subtlety of surface imitation, Parrish twisting a lexicon into desire, and so many other excellent thinkers. A multitude, at a moment when the narratives being served are monochrome.”
- Halim Madi, computational poet
“Finally, a book that avoids the blanket doom or utopia scenarios offered by critics and acolytes of large language models. First Encounters with AI shows real writers grappling—in ways both reasoned and affected—with the implications of these systems for the work that is most at stake: writing, reading, and the teaching of both. Engaging from start to finish, the essays assembled here range from the personal to scholarly inquiry, and together they refuse the pressure to declare AI use in strict binary terms: good or bad, useful or lazy. Instead, First Encounters with AI offers a clear-eyed articulation of what it can mean to be a writer, creative or academic or otherwise, amid this moment’s swarm of AI tools and strong opinions. Edited by Nina Beguš, whose Artificial Humanities provides a critical framework, the collection suggests a nuanced reframing: not writing in the age of AI, but AI’s moment in the long durée that is the age of writing.”
- Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, author of Travesty Generator