First Encounters with AI

Book Reviews

“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

“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