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.