First Encounters with AI

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, scholars, translators, technologists, language artists—are grappling with profound shifts in how stories are conceived, crafted, and shared. This volume brings together seventeen acclaimed contributors from around the world to reflect on their early, intimate encounters with generative text.

We are at a moment when artificial intelligence feels at once thrilling, unsettling, and unavoidable. These essays portray AI not as a monolith, but as a dynamic field of possibility and tension, 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. It is a book for anyone curious about the future of writing, for readers and writers wondering where human expression fits within emerging machinic worlds, and for librarians and booksellers tracking one of the defining cultural conversations of the 2020s.