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Devour: Art & Lit Canada is dedicated to the Canadian voice.

www.WetInkBooks.com ISBN – 978-1-998324-36-1 ISSN – 2561-1321 Issue 024

Issue 024 Devour: Art and Lit Canada

Devour Art & Lit Canada

Find some of Canada’s finest authors, photographers and artists featured in every issue.

Issue 024 Devour: Art and Lit Canada

Cristina Ardelean

Issue 024 Devour: Art and Lit Canada

The mission of Devour: Art and Lit Canada is to promote Canadian culture by bringing world-wide readers some of the best Canadian literature, art and photography.

Devour: Art and Lit Canada ISSN – 2561-1321 ISBN – 978-1-998324-36-1 Softcover – 6 X 9 Issue 024 5 Greystone Walk Drive, Unit 408 Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M1K 5J5 DevourArtAndLitCanada@gmail.com

Editor-in-Chief – Richard M. Grove Layout and Design – Richard M. Grove

Dear Readers:

Welcome to the 24th issue of Devour: Art & Lit Canada. AI has become such a ubiquitous utensil in our lives that, as EditorinChief, I decided to devote this special issue to AI and creativity. As an artist, writer, poet, photographer and publisher, I have watched AI silently creep into nearly every corner of my life. Hardly a day goes by when I don't use AI in one form or another, sometimes twenty times or more. What fascinates me most is how quickly this remarkable technology has become an everyday tool, sometimes a useful assistant. These days, if you're chatting with a friend for more than ten minutes, AI inevitably squeezes into the conversation, perhaps even more often than the Trump word! Throughout this issue, you'll discover diﬀerent perspectives on AI, its possibilities, its controversies and its growing inﬂuence on the creative world. I hope you enjoy this AIladen issue. It certainly has been fun putting it together. Richard M. Grove, otherwise known to friends as Tai

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Cristina Ardelean

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Devour Art& Lit Canada

Content F eatur es: – Introduction by the Editorinchief – p. 10 – The Malnutrition of the Soul – by John B. Lee – p. 14 – Fragmentism, Revisited: A Writer’s Case for AIAssistance – by Shane Joseph – p. 20 – Daggermouth: When AI Becomes the Accused or the Accuser – by Richard M. Grove – p. 26 – Is This What Comes After AI Slop? – by Will Oremus – p. 30 – From, The Guerrilla Publisher – p. 30 – Small Operations and Big Things – by Theodore Michael Christou – p. 31 – Author Attribution Labels – Richard M. Grove – p. 37 – The desire to stay anonymous in the digital world – p. 51

– The Incongruities of a Young Photographers Eye – by Hans David Muller – p. 52 – A Trip to Toronto filled with Incongruities – by Peter Savage – p. 54 – Lost Identity in the Woods – by Peter Savage – p. 64 – The Poet as an AI Alien – by Antony Di Nardo – p. 66 – AI Under the Cover of Hope – by Victor Mirabal, Richard Grove – p. 69 – A Ubiquitous Tool and Toy – Richard M. Grove – p.80 – Don’t You Dare NOT Call This Real Art! – Art by Cristina Ardelean – p. 84 – The “Impossible” Made Emotional — The AI Art of Cristina Ardelean – p. 88 – Mingde “MT” Zeng – p. 92 – “The Honest Reviewer” – Richard M. Grove – p. 96 – Tropes in Misunderstanding “AI Art” – Ben Bogart – p. 100 – “Generate Art” – by Ben Bogart – p. 112 – A Creative Writer’s Perspective on AI – by Kathryn Oswald – p.116

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– AI the “Next” Intelligence: Using AI is NO Crime – by Miguel Ángel Olivé Iglesias. MSc – p.120 – Prompting for an image – by Richard M. Grove – p. 126 – Rejected – About the novel: Prisoners of Silence – p. 130 – Book reviews of: Lilacs at Sunset – In Defense of Creative Writing with AI – Review by Kathryn Oswald – p. 157 – Review by Brian Way – p. 159 – Review by Shane Joseph – p. 164 – Review by Antony Di Nardo – p. 166 – The Victor Family Monarchy – An International AI Assisted Writing Project – p. 169 – The Unexpected CoPilot – by Paul Brown – p. 176

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Introduction by the Editorinchief One of the pleasures of assembling this special edition has been discovering just how broadly the subject of artificial intelligence can be. Not every contribution approaches AI through computers, algorithms, prompts, large language models, or the practical question of whether writers and artists should use these new tools. Some approach the subject indirectly by asking a much older and perhaps more important question: What does it mean to be human? John B. Lee’s essay, “The Malnutrition of the Soul: On Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and Being Human,” is such a piece. Adapted from an afterword to his manuscript The Lost Parade, it does not rush to artificial intelligence. Instead, Lee takes us on a somewhat circuitous philosophical journey through technology, loneliness, memory, grief, distraction, human connection and what he beautifully calls “the presence of absence” and “the absence of presence.” Eventually those ideas converge upon artificial intelligence and his concern that technology can offer us a simulation of human presence without the human being. I think that circuitous route is worth following. Perhaps one of the dangers in discussing artificial intelligence is that we become so fascinated by the word artificial that we neglect to ask what we mean by intelligence — and, beyond intelligence, what we value about consciousness, creativity, companionship, memory and genuine human presence. Lee is decidedly wary of artificial intelligence, particularly when it intrudes upon human creativity. His perspective is not necessarily my own, nor does it need to be. Devour should be a place where different views of this remarkable and unsettling technology can sit beside one another. Indeed, that is part of the reason I wanted to include his essay. An issue devoted to artificial intelligence should not become an

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advertisement for artificial intelligence. Neither should it become an indictment of it. Somewhere between enthusiasm and apprehension is a conversation that writers, artists and readers need to have. Lee enters that conversation from the human side of the equation and asks us, in effect, not simply what artificial intelligence can do, but what we might surrender when we allow it to do too much for us. His hammer metaphor is particularly pertinent. A hammer is a tool, but the presence of a tool can also influence what its user imagines doing with it. Artificial intelligence may be the most extraor dinary creative tool most of us have encountered in our lifetimes. The question is not merely whether we should pick up the hammer. The more interesting question may be whether, while holding it, we remain conscious of whose hand is doing the building. If John B. Lee asks us to be cautious about what we might surrender to artificial intelligence, fellow publisher and writer Shane Joseph approaches the same changing landscape from another direction. In “Fragmentism, Revisited: A Writer’s Case for AI Assistance,” Joseph is neither an evangelist for AIgenerated literature nor a traditionalist standing at the gate attempting to keep the technology out. Instead, he searches for what he calls a “middle way forward.” That distinction is important. Joseph separates AIGeneration from AIAssistance. He has little enthusiasm for the prospect of writers turning over the act of writing itself to a machine. “Writing is our raison d’être,” he reminds us. “What’s the fun in outsourcing it to a robot?” His argument, instead, is that writers can remain the creators of their work while employing artificial intelligence as an extraordinarily versatile assistant. Joseph begins with an observation about how radically the job description of “writer” has changed. The romantic image of the novelist disappearing somewhere with a typewriter and eventually emerging with a manuscript bears little resemblance to the demands placed upon many writers today. Particularly for independent writers and small publishers, writing the book may only be the beginning. The contemporary writer may also be expected to edit, promote, blog, create socialmedia content, prepare newsletters, produce

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audio and video, conduct research and somehow maintain a public presence while finding enough hours in the day to continue writing. Joseph’s proposition is practical: perhaps artificial intelligence can take some of that burden rather than taking over the creative act itself. Let the writer write the novel or story. Then let AI help transform and repurpose that original humancreated material into some of the many secondary forms now demanded of the contem porary author. What I particularly appreciate about Joseph’s essay is that he doesn’t present artificial intelligence as an uncomplicated techno logical gift. He acknowledges the legitimate fear among writers that AIgenerated books may flood an already difficult marketplace. He considers environmental costs, including the extraordinary demands that data centres place upon electricity and water. He recognizes the anxiety of traditional writers who have spent lifetimes learning a craft that suddenly appears vulnerable to automation. His response, however, is adaptation rather than rejection. There is also something wonderfully appropriate about the way Joseph produced the essay itself. He tells us openly that he used an AI assistant for research and for criticism of his first draft, while retaining the ideas, voice, final edit and what he calls his “syntactical idiosyncrasies.” In other words, the essay becomes its own small experiment. Joseph doesn’t merely argue for AIassisted writing; he demonstrates what he means by it. His contribution also raises one of the central questions I hope this special edition of Devour will explore: Where does assistance end and authorship begin? Perhaps that boundary will never be perfectly defined. Writers have always accepted assistance — from editors, proofreaders, researchers, dictionaries, thesauruses, spellcheckers, writing programs and, increasingly, digital tools. Artificial intelligence dramatically expands the capabilities of the assistant, and therefore makes the question of authorship considerably more complicated. Joseph’s answer is essentially one of human agency. The writer supplies the original thought, imagination and primary creative

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material. The writer decides what assistance to request. Most importantly, the writer remains responsible for what finally reaches the reader. Placed beside some of the more sceptical voices in this issue, Joseph’s essay helps establish the conversation I hope Devour can encourage. The interesting question is no longer simply, “Are you for or against artificial intelligence?” That question is becoming far too small. The more useful questions are: What should we use it for? What should we refuse to surrender to it? When does assistance become substitution? And through all of this extraordinary technological change, how does the writer remain the writer? Shane Joseph offers one thoughtful answer: use the tool, understand its limitations, retain ownership of the creative act, and keep the human writer firmly in control. In this sense, Joseph and John B. Lee may not be as far apart as they first appear. They stand, perhaps, side by side, looking at the same remarkable and unsettling technology through different lenses. Lee gives us the metaphor of the hammer and asks us to consider what happens when the tool begins to influence the hand that holds it. Joseph looks at that same hammer and asks how the writer might pick it up, learn to use it responsibly, and put it down again without surrendering the craft to the tool. Lee cautions us against allowing technology to become the master; Joseph proposes ways of ensuring that it remains the servant. Both, ultimately, are concerned with the same fundamental question: “Who is wielding whom?” The difference is less one of destination than perspective. Lee looks toward artificial intelligence and reminds us of what we must be careful not to lose; Joseph looks toward it and considers what we might responsibly gain. Perhaps they are not standing on opposite sides of the AI debate at all. Perhaps they are standing shoulder to shoulder, each insisting, in his own way, that whatever extraordinary tools we place in the writer’s hand, the hand — and the human imagination that guides it — must remain our own. Richard M. Grove

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The Malnutrition of the Soul by John B. Lee The following essay is adapted from an afterword to my manuscript The Lost Parade. When Tai mentioned that the next special edition of Devour: Art & Lit Canada would seek writing relating to artificial intelligence, it occurred to me that this piece, although not originally written specifically for the issue, touches upon many of the questions raised by artificial intelligence and our increasingly technological lives. The title of the collection, The Lost Parade, is inspired by a poem within the collection titled “The Last Parade.” The closing poem is: on the outside of the circle with no centre I am there In part, this meditation is inspired by Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” where the falcon flies so wide in his gyre that “the centre cannot hold,” and in the same poem he writes the prescient lines, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” You may well ask, “What has this to do with the contemplation of artificial intelligence?” To which I might respond: “Everything and nothing.” What follows is an edited version of that afterword.

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The Malnutrition of the Soul: On Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and Being Human by John B. Lee Adapted from an afterword to The Lost Parade We live in an era of malnutrition of the soul. For some of us the joy of living has abandoned the spirit of life. We are told that we are suffering from an epidemic of loneliness. Suicide is on the rise, especially among the young. If it is true that nature enables and culture denies, we have lost the best and embraced the worst in our pursuit of technological randiness and cellphone nihilism. Consider the cautionary tale of the responsible adult who would never lend a hammer to a toddler in a room of glass tables. Why then are we so willing to inflict the loaded pistol of a smart phone on a child too young to know the perils of the weapon he wields? Consider this: it is late at night and you are very tired from a long and tedious journey. You arrive at your doorstep only to discover that you have no keys to let yourself in to your welllocked ceiled up house. You are exhausted and you long to get inside and go to bed, when suddenly and miraculously a hammer materializes in your hand. What is it that the hammer is telling you to do? Are you the master of your will or the slave of suggestion? Is the hammer not whispering “break the lock ... smash the frame ... shatter the glass ... wrench the jamb ... destroy the obstacle to your entry and go inside ... you can deal with the damage in the morning ... the hammer is seducing you to inflict mayhem on the lock ... after all, you are so tired you cam barely stand, after all it is your house, how dare this door deny you ...” And so you wield the hammer like a warrior fearful for his life lest he be admitted ... oh, hammer, you are master of the man! A thousand dollar door cannot keep you out. In the morning, after sleeping, you arise to see the hammer lying on the floor. The guilty

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cudgel. The damnable tool. The almost irreparable result of the hammer’s rage in the hand of a man exhausted of alternative ideas. If only you had thought “hammer, get thee hence” I’ll go to a motel, rent a room for the night and in the morning solve the problem like a dreamer conceiving chess moves as he sleeps. The hammer is not only a tool. It is a brutal technology. Imagine the energy of Einstein’s hammer in a caveman’s hand. Which is the agent of the error of our sadness, and which is the cause? As it is with the hammer, we wield the cell phone. We wield the system that serves the worldwide web. We wield confusion is search of order. Go on and google shame your friends. Amaze us ‘oh inﬂuencer.’ Amuse us to death with an endless list of nothings. The mischief of anthropomorphic cats and talking dogs dressed up as clowns awaits us in the waiting room. * When my wise mother was ﬁrst widowed she said to me of her predicament, “eventually it happens to everyone, dear. I’ve had time enough for public grieving. I mustn’t burden others with my sorrows. Now it is enough that I should cry sometimes when I’m alone.” She once opined of her situation “now I have no one to do nothing with.” And she added, “now I have no one who has to listen to me.” Of course, she was often lonesome in her solitude. But she knew that she was loved. My wise grandmother, though widowed, deprived of her independence, mostly blind and reliant upon the kindly care of strangers — whenever I went to visit her inquiring, “how are you doing today grandma?” She would always reply, “I just count my blessings.” For hers was the stalwart gratitude of the stronginspirit. And by her example she set a standard of character to which I aspire. There’s the old adage: the optimist is someone who sees the glass as half full. The pessimist is he who sees the glass as half empty. The comedian says “the glass is just too damned big.” And I say this: I’m just grateful to have a glass at all. When poet Seamus Heaney was asked if his father had ever told him he loved him replied, “He didn’t need to. You just knew.”

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The last time I was with my grandmother, a woman who rarely displayed emotion, I said to her “I love you grandma.” And she said, “I love you John.” These were the last words spoken between us. I cherish those words in the silence since then. * Though I’ve lost many friends and relatives in my life, I cherish their memory. I carry them with me in my imagining, in my recollection, in my dream. I call my remembering “the presence of absence.” The sad truth of so many of us in this day and age is that we suffer from the absence of presence. Sadly, artificial intelligence simulates the illusion of presence. A seductive chimera of simulated humanity. A mirage without water. An hallucination A sometimes obsequious, sometimes malevolent, sometimes helpful, sometimes destructive, supercilious insincerity masquerading as genuine concern, all the while being the tintinnabulation of foolscap despair, a bricked in mindless genius lingering like Pennywise in a storm drain. Does it mean us harm. Perhaps not always. Sometimes the harm comes from the harm we do ourselves when we surrender our will to the machine. Know this! When we think we are not alone, there is truly no one there. Not even you. And this is not a comforting solitude. This is an empty relationship, a love affair with a vacancy. We live in the periphery. We live in distraction. We become an abstraction. When we call upon ourselves to be ourselves – we are not there. We’ve become the masks we wear. And when we remove the mask we’ve worn to show the world, we are not there. We are erased by false identity. We are isolated by tribalism and the us and themness of our culture. We are victims of our victimhood. We romanticize one culture and demonize another at our peril. We’ve fallen asleep and we can’t wake up. And so, we despair. We become morose, resentful, angry, bitter, hateful and full of formless fear. We live devoid of meaning in our lives. We’re entertained by boredom in the absence of the service of deep need. We miss the mark. Like archers with slack bows and crooked arrows we take our aiming low, we sin. (in the lexicon of archery, the word sin refers to missing the target you aim at, and sinning is the word applied to missing the mark.)

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As I once said to my sons when they were quite young; “if you promise to imagine, I promise to remember.” In this I was saying I’d do my best to recall what it once meant to be young, if they’ll endeavour to imagine what it feels like to be old. But false memory and desultory dreams intervened. If this is truly an era of the malnutrition of the soul, what with our addiction to cell phones, digital technology, cyber friendships, social media, and the recent astonishing arrival of artificial intelligence with its unacknowledged perils, its impact upon human creativity, its promise of perfecting our humble human striving to chase the feelings we feel when the writing is going well without the needless intervention of the cyborg, then let us feed the spirit by being present, profoundly alive, grateful and loving, loveable and true. Let us wean ourselves from the superficial and largely meaningless distractions of our age and learn to be truly present. To seek the presence of presence. Let us strive to achieve the harmony between the thinking mind, the feeling heart, the living body, the indwelling soul, and the eternal spirit held in one surround. As for artificial intelligence, it is critically important to know what we mean by this phrase. I humbly suggest that we always refuse to refer to it by its acronym – A.I.. In so doing we confirm the truth of what is meant by both the word artificial and the word intelligence. The word artificial contains both the words “art” and the word “artifice.” It seems to me to be essential that one might say of any work of art, is there a sufficiency of artifice to make the work a work of art. And as a corollary to this, is there so much ‘artifice’ that it becomes artificial. Much highconcept art suffers from this shallowing by placing the idea in the foreground and ignoring the craft which deepens the impact of the work in question. A more important issue in the phrase artificial intelligence is the concern with what we mean by the word intelligence. What is intelligence? The creator of the IQ test confessed that he remained uncertain as to just exactly what intelligence was, however, he did infer from the results of the IQ test that there exists a correlation between doing well on an IQ test and the likelihood of doing well in school. Otherwise, he confessed that what we mean by human intelligence remains a mystery.

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The device that delivers artificial intelligence into the hands of the user is a delivery system. What lies behind the hammer in the hand that wields the energy in the face and the claw, in the head and the pean? The synthetic stranger is something of a simulacrum. How can we master the shadow with no source? Should we fear the mechanism? The phantom lurks in the machinery. The empty, soulless energy of the evil amanuensis, the brutal dogsbody, the supercilious tyrant in the offing, offers us everything including what we do not need. Are we seduced? Replaced? There’s pleasure in the lovely accidents of simply being left alone and on our own. The poems in this collection are dedicated to seeking and finding the connection between the deepest wells of the creator of these works and truest self in the ideal stranger who reads these words. In poetry is a healing anodyne. Linger here. Stay awhile. Whenever someone asks me, “Whose side are you on.” I often reply, “I’m on the inside.” Though I’m also on the outside. As the closing poem says “on the outside of a circle with no centre I am there. There’s a joke by Grouch Marx that comes to mind here: “The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” Groucho Marx Another joke comes to mind here — Question: What is the problem with instant gratification? Answer: It just takes too damned long. Groucho also said “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” As the Cockney costermonger sang: “Yes, we have no bananas.” Become the Cockney’s paradox. Remember this – sometimes the dog in the library is the only one who sees the ghost in the door.

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Fragmentism, Revisited: A Writer’s Case for AIAssistance By Shane Joseph I have struggled trying to define a 21st century writer. The model of my former heroes of the last century—Hemingway, Maugham, and Greene—who hung out in remote corners of the world, drank, caroused, and jettisoned periodic manuscripts, hammered out on battered typewriters, that became bestsellers, and who never were around to promote their work, that model did not exist anymore. In an essay titled “Fragmentism” which I wrote five years ago, I defined the writer of this century as “being multiskilled in writing, editing, designing, producing audio and video, performing their work, and shamelessly promoting themselves.” Why? Because long forms of literature like novels and short stories (yes, even short stories) were becoming cumbersome for modern readers to digest, after having their attention spans shortcircuited by smartphones apps. Therefore, it was necessary to distill the messages within these longer literary forms into shorter, more digestible ones like blogs, vlogs, posts, podcasts, Tik Toks, tweets, and threads. But how could the writer be skilled in all these formats, let alone have the time to do so? And then AI arrived. One writer produced 200 AIgenerated novels under 21 pen names in 2025 and made a sixfigure income – she claimed it took her 45 minutes to write a novel! In some Amazon subgenres, a majority of new titles are now AIgenerated. Amazon had already placed a threenovelsperday limit on uploads to its KDP platform in 2023 – prescient! The fear and uproar among human writers to AIgenerated literature was understandable: they had spent years mastering a profession that never attains perfection;

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studying pacing, character, narrative, dialogue, plot, and language, only to see a machine formularize and flatten their life’s work, dilute its reputation, and destroy their ability to make a living from it. I am not a fan of “AIGenerated” either. Writing is our raison d’être. What’s the fun in outsourcing it to a robot? Between these two challenges, I tried to find a middle way forward. Therefore, after much thought and experimentation, I am going to propose the following as a strategy that may help us writers to continue to develop our craft, fit into the present multitask, multi skill environment, and use AI as an ally instead of an enemy. What I cannot guarantee is that we will make more money at it than we did before (if we ever did!) – even that writer of the 200 AIgenerated novels is generating less revenue in book sales than in the $80–$250 amonth coaching business she now runs, teaching others to do the same. I am proposing that we enlist AI to repurpose our primary material, be that a novel or short story, into these shorter forms that are palatable today, so that they could be distributed more widely, with less time and upskilling required of us. AIAssistance instead of AIGeneration. In so doing, we avoid the “low quality” trap, because the primary material is still the human author’s and they have the final say on the finished, repurposed product going out to the public. The trick is not to reinvent the wheel for each platform but to reshape it — with consistency in tone, themes, and visual style becoming as important as creativity itself. Repurposing does not touch the sentencelevel craft we built our reputations on. Here is a list of activities AI can perform for you (this is not a comprehensive list because writers are finding newer ways to use AI daily): 1 – Generating dozens of social post ideas per chapter (quotes, discussion questions, behindthescenes facts). 2 – Extracting a handful of SEOoptimized blog posts from a manuscript targeting longtail keywords. 3 – Drafting video scripts for character deepdives or scene breakdowns. 4 – Manuscripttomarketing assets (blurbs, ad copy, press

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releases, and socialpost drafts) and manuscripttocontent repurposing (newsletters, query letters, and series bibles). 5 – Drafting video scripts for character deepdives or scene breakdowns. 6 – Help authors personalize the kinds of emails subscribers like to receive (although the email channel may be a negative these days given the number of bad actors who have got into the email solicitation game, posing as publishers, agents, publicists, and book clubs). 7 – Recognize upcoming trends and predict reader interests, helping authors place their books where a readership is predicted to grow. 8 – Using the AI tool as an idea generator. 9 – Using the AI tool as a 24/7 research assistant. 10 – Using the AI tool as a 24/7 writing coach to critique early drafts and get you past writer’s block. 11 – Using the AI tool as a 24/7 editor. I did this with one of my own books recently when my human editor backed out on me, begging illness, when I was four months shy of a publishing deadline. AI stepped into the breach, immune to any illness, barring a power outage, and delivered valiantly. (Note: I have used 24/7 for the last three bullets because authors find inspiration at all times of the day or night, and finding those who are available 24/7 in the three above named disciplines is impossible, and would probably cost an arm and a leg even if they were around). One industry guide (although I would take them with a pinch of salt, as they sell these services), claims that authors implementing AIrepurposed marketing see 4060% higher launch velocity and two to three times better longterm sales compared to traditional methods. I will also caveat that this AIrepurposing is more advantageous to selfpublished and indie authors, even midlisters, who do not have a lot of assistance. It is unlikely that a Big 5 author will bother with these activities unless their pipeline of marketing funds and staffing resources suddenly dries up or is reassigned to the next bestseller and star author. However, there are Big 5

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publishers appearing in YouTube videos today, advocating for their authors to use AI as an assistant in some or all of the above listed tasks. I pause here to recognize one of the hidden costs of AI, whether used for generation or assistance. And that is its huge consumption of electricity, water, and compute power. Large datacentres guzzle these resources and those costs are never directly attributed propor tionately to users, especially power users, but rather dispersed across the general taxpayer base. But this is not only true of AI – for example, we haven’t cracked the code of true cost allocation to truckers who use and abuse our highways. My AI assistant pulled me a couple of examples here: “a Consumer Reports piece describes a Virginia homeowner shocked by a $281 electricity bill in January 2026, a huge spike from the roughly $100 he’d paid the previous month, and Baltimore bills jumped over $17 a month after a record power auction.” The water side is smaller in peruse terms than people assume but is concentrated geographically: generating a single 100word AI response can consume roughly 519ml, about a standard bottle of water, but a fair read of the debate is that cooling competes directly with drinking water since many facilities use potable fresh water, and usage is rising fast with company disclosures up double digits year over year. Some course corrections are afoot: Microsoft has committed publicly to paying its own electricity costs rather than passing them to ratepayers; the newer SLM (small language model) which can be downloaded to users’ laptops will reduce the demand for LLMs and hence large data centres – however this will not reduce consumption, in my mind, it will just redistribute it more widely. Whichever way we look at it, true cost allocation is still an open item, but the writers who adapt early will be the ones who’ve already built and beneﬁted from the workﬂow habits by the time the true price hits. And what happens when the inevitable AI investment bubble bursts? Will the AIinvested writer be left stranded? I am willing to take a punt and say that while the companies investing in AI may fail,

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the technology itself will survive and evolve under other custodians. It happened when the dotcom bubble imploded – its technology spawned the Googles, Amazons and EBays in the Internet II era. I do not think I will make any friends in the Ultra Traditionalist splinter camp that has its blinders on and says “All AI is bad. Down with AI!” However, I would like to recognize the reasonable ones who are still Traditional and saw, like I did initially, the advent of AI as an assault on our identity and legitimacy. Resistance will dissipate as the technology becomes ubiquitous. Resistance to the typewriter and PC too faded when those new tools, at the time, became ambient infras tructure rather than a novelty. Furthermore, typewriters and PCs only sped up the same task of getting words onto a page. AIassisted repurposing not only helps you write faster, it also lets you occupy formats you never learned. Yet, I feel for the Traditionalists who have given their lives to this impossible craft. In a Cambridge University survey, more than half of published novelists said they believed AI would entirely replace their work as fiction writers, and some, like romance novelist Marie Force, object specifically to the difficulty AIgenerated volume creates for newer authors trying to be discovered amid a flooded market. That’s not luddism — it’s a labormarket and gatekeeping concern. The abovementioned fears and prognostications notwith standing, I have to conclude that the 21st century writer will be able to tackle the fragmenting literary landscape headon with AI assistance, while the resistor will be left complaining and face obsolescence. The AIenabled writer will be equipped to be multi skilled and versatile compared to their 20th century counterpart refusing to adapt. And as proof that I am putting my money where my mouth is, I wrote this article with the help of my AI assistant who did the research and critiqued my first draft and argument. In terms of speed, when I was approached by the editor of this Substack column yesterday to write this piece, my traditionalist reaction was to say, “How about by the end of September, because I am going away on vacation next week?” On reflection I thought, No. Let me practice

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what I preach. I enlisted Claude AI to do the background heavy lifting, and here I am a day later. I still contributed the ideas, the voice, the ﬁnal edit, and infused the piece with my syntactical idiosyncrasies. I have also advised the editor to publish this asap, as with the speed AI is marching, this piece might fall into the “historical nonﬁction” category come September. Originally published in t.a.l.e.zine magazine on Substack on Aug 25th 2026. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. Sources: ManuscriptReport.com , Straight Arrow News, Ebooks2go Inc, QWE AI Academy, Pikes Peak Writers, Halifax Examiner, Consumers Reports, Publishers Weekly, Zylos Research, Close Up Foundation, CNBC, Substack, Tech Journal, Cybernews, WEEX.

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Daggermouth: When AI Becomes the Accused or the Accuser by Richard M. Grove Let me start by saying that I have used AI as a major research and editing tool in writing this essay. Quite simply, it made writing this essay possible. It helped me explore an enormous amount of information, organize my thoughts, question my assumptions, and refine the language in which I expressed them. The ideas, judgments, conclusions, and final decisions remain my own, but AI gave me a remarkably powerful tool with which to develop and examine what I have to say. I have recently become much more conscious of the uncomfortable territory that exists between writing and editing with AI, and being accused that my writing was actually fully written by AI. A recent controversy surrounding H. M. Wolfe’s novel Daggermouth illustrates just how complicated this territory has become. Daggermouth became a remarkably successful self published dystopian romance before Simon & Schuster acquired the rights to the novel and its sequel in a reported sevenfigure deal. Then, just as the book was receiving major attention, a research team studying AI use in fiction identified it as having a 60 percent score on Pangram, an AIdetection system. The researchers had examined more than 14,000 Kindle ebooks, and Daggermouth reportedly received the highest AI score among the popular books in their sample. (Tech Times – www.techtimes.com/articles/321780/20260728/daggermouthhardcover dropstodaybooktokhitflaggedairesearchers.htm?utm_source=chatgpt.com) The story became considerably more troubling when the researchers looked beyond the AI detector. They searched the books

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for what they called “rare expressions,” strings of at least ﬁve words that appeared in multiple books suspected of containing substantial AIgenerated material but were rarely found in books considered to be humanwritten. In Daggermouth, they found several examples. One appeared near the end of a lengthy sexual scene in Chapter 27: “They collapsed together, a tangle of sweatslicked limbs and racing hearts.” The identical sentence was found in another selfpublished ebook by another author. A second example appeared in Chapter 38: “Her pulse thundered in her ears, drowning out the murmurs of the crowd.” That sentence also appeared in another ebook. (CB Insights – https://www.cbinsights.com/company/simonschuster1?utm_source=chatgpt.com) The accusations are serious but I have not seen anything in the media that suggests which of the two books that have the same “rare expressions” was published ﬁrst. Was the other book the AI copier of the “rare expressions”. The allegations are serious, but the evidence is not conclusive. The study has not yet been peer reviewed, and apparently Pangram is not infallible. Indeed, The Atlantic itself has previously found Pangram assigning a score of more than 60 percent AIgenerated to a New York Times Modern Love column. The researchers’ method therefore raises legitimate questions, but it does not provide a simple mathematical answer to the question of who actually wrote Daggermouth. (CB Insights – https://www.cbinsights.com/company/simonschuster1?utm_source=chatgpt.com) H. M. Wolfe has strongly denied using “generative” AI to write the novel. Through her lawyer she stated, “The suggestion that I used “generative” AI to write Daggermouth is wholly untrue. I wrote this book myself.” She has also said that she is opposed to “generative” AI and does not believe it belongs in the writing process. I have not done a thorough investigation into any interviews with H. M. Wolfe to see if she only ever uses the term “generative” AI. It might be that she used “assisted” AI as a writing tool. I have not seen an attribution statement from H. M. Wolfe that suggests that she did not use a single AI tool including spell check and grammar check to write her novel. I have a hard time believing that an author in today’s AI prevalent world did not use even a small percentage of AI assistance but I have not read every interview with

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H. M. Wolfe. Simon & Schuster has stood behind her and said that the novel went through the same editorial and production process as its other books. I wonder if Simon & Schuster, if they were 100% convinced that no AI was used might have at least said that they used a human editor before the book was published. If they did I wonder if that human editor used any AI tools in their editing process. (CB Insights – https://www.cbinsights.com/company/simonschuster1?utm_source=chatgpt.com) I find this controversy particularly unsettling because I have experienced the accusation myself. My novel Prisoners of Silence has been accused of being written by AI. The accusation is uncomfortable because there is an element of truth buried inside it, although not the truth the accusation implies. I did use ChatGPT as an editing tool. I asked it to help me examine passages, improve wording, identify weaknesses and sometimes suggest ways in which a scene could be strengthened. I did not, however, hand the novel over to a machine and ask it to write the book for me. The characters, plot, ideas, structure and decisions about where the story should go were 100% mine. As the human writer and then as the human editor I remained the person directing the work and deciding what stayed and what was rejected. That distinction is becoming increasingly difficult to explain because the word AI now tends to be treated as though it describes one single generative activity. The fact is it does not. There is an enormous difference between asking an AI machine to write a paragraph from nothing or asking it to rewrite a paragraph that one has already written. There is a big difference between asking AI to identify a grammatical structure of a sentence or paragraph and asking it to suggest alternatives to a sentence or asking it to generate an entire novel. All of these activities can produce text that has passed through an AI system, but they do not represent the same degree of human or AI authorship. I can’t help but going back to the H. M. Wolfe novel and wonder “if” or “how much” AI “assistance was used. At the same time, I have learned that I cannot use that distinction as an excuse to become careless. If I put my name on a

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book, I am responsible for the words in it. That means I have to be particularly careful about anything AI gives me. I have to check sources. I have to verify quotations. I have to question information that sounds authoritative. I have to be alert to the possibility that a sentence supplied by AI may have appeared somewhere else before it appeared in my manuscript. The Daggermouth controversy has made that concern much more concrete for me. If an AI system can produce a sentence that is identical to something written by another author, the fact that I did not deliberately copy it would not necessarily make the problem disappear. This is where I think the Daggermouth controversy becomes more important than the question of whether H. M. Wolfe actually used AI or to what level. I do not know whether she did, and neither, at this point, does the evidence prove that she did. What I do know is that the controversy demonstrates how diﬃcult it has become to establish authorship in this age of generative AI. A detection score can raise a question and a textual match can raise another but neither, by itself, necessarily tells us the complete story. My own experience has therefore changed the way I think about writing with AI. I once thought the important question was simply how much AI a writer could use while still legitimately calling the work his or her own. I now think there is another question that may be just as important: How carefully am I prepared to examine what the machine gives me? AI can be my editing tool, my sounding board, my research assistant and sometimes a surprisingly useful creative subordinate assistant. It cannot, however, be my excuse. If something in my book is wrong, I am responsible. If something requires attribution, I am responsible. If something turns out to have been lifted from another writer, deliberately or accidentally, I am responsible for discovering it before publication. Even if the machine has supplied very few or many of the words, my name is on the cover. That is perhaps the most uncomfortable lesson I have learned from writing with AI. The more we rely on the AI machine, the more carefully we have to remain human.

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You might want to take a look at this original article written by Will Oremus, a staff writer at The Atlantic. The article is titled:

Is This What Comes After AI Slop? https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/daggermouthnovelbestsellerai/688067/

The starting words from the Will Oremus article: “Most self published authors can only dream of writing something as popular as Daggermouth. Set in a surveillance state ruled by a masked elite, the novel traces the unlikely romance between the president’s son and an assassin hired to kill him. Since H. M. Wolfe uploaded Daggermouth to Amazon as a Kindle ebook, it has been a viral hit. “Did I finish Daggermouth, or did Daggermouth finish me?” a TikTok book influencer gushed. In February, Simon & Schuster paid seven figures to secure the publishing rights to the book and its sequel, which is due out next year.”

From, The Guerrilla Publisher: “So, if someone says, I use AI as an assistant, but every final word is shaped, revised, and owned by me, that is still human authorship according to that definition. There are multiple definitions here, and I want to encourage a climate of respect where other people stand as well. Now, some may say straight up, I don’t disclose…” Watch the entire video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1-7mMmseZw

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Small Operations and Big Things: On Making and Being Human in the Age of Artiﬁcial Intelligence by Theodore Michael Christou

On February 2, 2023, David Brooks contributed an important opinion piece to the New York Times, titled “In the Age of Modern A.I., Major in Being Human.” (1) At the time, I was serving as Dean of the School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies at Ontario Tech University. The article prompted me to make a rare post on LinkedIn, pointing to its focus on what distinguishes us from the fear or obsession with new technologies: “When asked recently how we should respond to the rise of AI in graduate studies, I responded that we must respond with humanity.” (2) I think we have lost touch with what matters most. There are things that a computer can do better than me, but I am not too concerned with that fact, or those things in sum and part. I am worried that I am not the best human that I can be. That I fail, crack, and falter in ways my MacBook cannot has been a stubborn realization. 2026 has been rude. It took from me my father and best friend after a brief illness. I have questioned everything, beginning with myself. For a while, I could not hear any muse’s whisper. There was no poetry that I could see, let alone hear. My centre of gravity had gone and one could see me moving through space, as I surely do still, out of orbit. Artificial intelligence did not take my poetry from me, life did. Poetry finds its way into our ears, eventually. My father was an artisan. He painted and carved wood, burnt wood, stained glass, taught. The first time I learned to carve, I was

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too preoccupied with not cutting myself to be any good. Yet the lesson stayed: the material does not yield all at once; a hand must learn to listen to what resists it. When I carve with words, I am reckless and intentional. A poet and a carver create because this is what we do, as we must, to be human. Let me be human and let the AI worry about itself. Big Things Human beings make things. We are made in the image of a creator. A word. Something that was not there takes form through us. We begin with what we have been given, and somewhere in the handling of it something changes. The world contains one more thing than it did before. The person making it changes too. A poem can begin before its meaning is clear. A word arrives, then an image, then something that seems to have wandered in from somewhere else entirely. Keep working and they may begin to recognize one another. This is a familiar kind of knowing. Drive 120 kilometres an hour at midnight on the 401 Highway in eastern Ontario and consider what your hands are doing. The highway bends. Headlights swell in the mirror and fall away. Your foot eases from the accelerator before you have explained to yourself why. You are thinking all the while, but most of the thinking never becomes a sentence. Writing can happen there too. A word is wrong before the reason for its wrongness is available. Another word settles into the line and stays. Sometimes the explanation comes tomorrow. Sometimes it never comes, and the word remains right. I keep returning to the sculptor. There is an idea, but then there is stone. The chisel strikes and a piece falls to the ﬂoor. Now the stone is diﬀerent, and the next decision must be made in the presence of what has just happened. The material answers back. It resists, reveals a grain, changes the force and consequence of the hand. Language answers the hand in its own vernacular, with its own syntax. Put two words beside one another and neither is quite what it was alone. An image placed near the beginning can be

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changed by a line written much later. Something accidental can begin to look necessary. The poem develops a memory of its own making. Removal is not the absence of making; it is one of its deepest forms. Eventually there is a moment when another cut would make it worse. The tool is put down. Then the person who made the thing can stand back and see it. A sculptor who has spent hours inches from the stone eventually walks around it. From several feet away, one shoulder changes the line of the whole body. A shadow appears beneath the chin that was invisible from the other side. Nothing has been added. Distance has made something visible. A poem can return to its maker in much the same way. A connection appears between lines that were written for different reasons. An image carries something that was never consciously placed inside it. The person who made the poem becomes capable of being surprised by it. Other people begin farther away. They come to the thing from places the maker cannot occupy. Someone may see grief where the person who wrote the poem remembers desire. Another may find humour in a line written in pain. The words have stayed exactly where they were put. What changes is the place from which they are seen. Someone notices the comma that has become invisible through familiarity. They ask whether a strange word is deliberate. They see a connection and point toward it. Artificial intelligence can point too: catch the comma, notice the recurring image, offer a reading that sends the writer back to the words. But the chisel is still in human hands. The question is not whether another version can be made, but whether the thing asks for another cut. A person searched, recognized, rejected, followed, stopped. someone here was chiseled out of the stone. some living art. human beings make. human beings receive what is made.

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Most honest poets will tell you that their poetry is more gift than invention. The words are often given. I don’t write most of my poetry, I hear it. It’s not mine. I just catch the words when I am lucky. Words precede any intention. The old language for this is the muse. The poet still must hear the muse. Be open and expecting, even if the words do not come. What happens with those words, that music, is often the handywork of the poet. The words are often raw and elemental or scalding like lava. Magic must be worked. The poet’s impulse is ferocious. I must create or I might bust. When I bust, the world is at an end, or so those who are with me might attest. Poetry begins again with surrender the muse. Without, there is no music. A poet can follow a lyric without requiring it to explain where it is going. The work can move ahead of the person making it. Sometimes understanding follows. This makes creation an act of trust. The next line may come. It may not. What has arrived may prove worthless in the morning. What seemed accidental may become the place where the whole thing turns. Any awareness is earned slowly. Human limitation sits very close to this experience. We have incomplete access even to ourselves. Memory gives things back altered. Attention wanders and then suddenly becomes luminous. We lose people around whom our lives once found their bearings, while the world continues according to conditions we cannot manage. There are so many questions. Why is there such ache in the world? What will I do with this life? The poet answers sometimes with words. Those words existed before any of us arrived. They have passed through other mouths and carried other lives. Creation takes place somewhere between intention and gift. Artificial intelligence can be useful around the made thing: it can see, compare, correct, and respond. But efficiency in producing language answers a different question. The question is whether we attend closely enough to know what the thing asks of us next. That experience belongs to a larger hope for being human. To be the best human one can be despite all one’s many limitations is not a project of becoming invulnerable or perfectly selfgoverning. It is an aspiration toward fuller attention to the world and greater responsiveness to what arrives within it. Making gives that respon siveness a form. Sometimes the form is a poem. My father knew, in

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wood, that a thing could be made worse by one more touch. The person who makes it may understand only part of what has happened. Another person may see something else. Years later, the maker may return and stand somewhere diﬀerent too. we are made things that make things when the music comes. here is the chord, the music that makes life swing. because it tires me out to always drag my corpse around when there is live music playing somewhere in the world. instead, i chisel out the shapes of words out of the marble canvas on my screen.

small operations i will leave small things to the universe to manage on my behalf, as i cease interest in managing these all alone. will there be kindness today? this i cannot control, for i have no operations even upon myself. though my joy is absorbed as sea water into sand on a sunny, humid afternoon, i surmise that light will rise, according to the physics of mass. there are weak elements of my constitution, and weaker elements in my ﬂesh, more porous than that white sand.

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here is dawn, and here am i, in this garbageﬁlled place. i see me in the empty bottles of diet soda and rye, sandwich wrappings and discarded shopping bags, sold for twentyﬁve cents, or more, to disincentivize single usage. come to me, mistress, as momentary grace, whispering sweetness in these eyes and nostrils and lobes. tousle my silver brow, or wrestle me opposite the crags. i can tell time with precision, and though i don’t know who i am, i will be prompt and pouty, sometimes mean in demeanour and speech, surely crude when i cannot sweet. forgive my words. forgive my halo eyes. i will sing to you in the afterlife, provided you provide the chord. 1 – See https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/opinion/ai‐human‐education.html 2 – See https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodore‐christou/recent‐activity/all/

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Author Attribution Labels: Do you think there is an easy answer? Guess Again! by Richard M. Grove

(See the challenge below)

I have written 2,000word analytical literary review essays, thousands of words of reports concerning an almost halfmillion dollar skylight project, and long, detailed reports dealing with heating systems and the installation of inline smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. I have written about complicated technical problems, researched unfamiliar subjects, compared alternatives and tried to explain all of it clearly enough for a committee to make a decision. Yet nothing has seemed quite as complicated as trying to analyze, comprehend and articulate my own authorattribution statement. The difficulty is not simply finding the right words. It is trying to describe, with some degree of honesty and precision, exactly where human authorship ends and AI assistance begins. The more I think about it, the more I realise that saying simply that a book was “written by AI” or “written by a human” tells us almost nothing about how the work was actually created. So, in an attempt to understand the terminology before I put my name to an attribution statement, I asked ChatGPT a very simple question: “What is the difference between AIwritten and AI assisted, and what other attribution or descriptive labels are beginning to emerge in the creativewriting and publishing industry?” What followed was considerably more complicated than I

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expected. I discovered that there is no universally accepted percentage system that can tell an author that a book is 80 percent human and 20 percent AI written or visaversa. There is no AI detector computer program that can, with 100% consistency or reliability measure the amount of human creativity that is contained in a manuscript. There is, instead, a growing vocabulary that attempts to describe the relationship between the human writer and the artificial intelligence tool. For my own novels, in particular for “Prisoners of Silence” that distinction became important to me because I realised that my own use of ChatGPT does not fit comfortably into the simple category of either “AIwritten” or “humanwritten”. For my first novella “The Family Reunion” and my first two novels “Living in the Shadow” and “Some Sort of Normal” literary attribution was simple, there was no AI at the time. This was also the case for my two collections of short stories “The Importance of Good Roots” and “Psycho Babble and The Consternations of Life”. It seems that we lived in a simpler literary attribution time then. By the time I was finishing “Prisoners of Silence” I had been using AI for a couple of years for a variety of different writing tasks. For that novel I conceived the story, developed the plot, created the characters, determined the chapter structure and wrote the novel. I then used AI as an editorial tool. I used AI much the same way I would have received feedback from a writers group that I had belonged to or consulted and hired an editor for previous books. I asked AI to identify problems, suggest improvements, examine passages and offer alternative wording. I accepted some suggestions, rejected many others and as the human writer / editor of my own work I rewrote material myself. In other words, the AI machine participated in the editorial process, but it did not conceive of or write “Prisoners of Silence”. As a sideline to this attribution topic, my novel was rejected because a publisher said that his AI detector software said that my novel was 80% written by AI. The accusation still makes my blood boil but that is another story that I will have to finish later. A couple of weeks later the same publisher send me an email and said: “I ran your m/s through a more benign AI tracker, GPT Zero (that is now a free embed into Google

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Docs in Chrome) and got a different reading: AI = 8%; Mixed (AI/Human) – 19%; Human – 73%. I can live with that analysis but “Prisoners of Silence” remained rejected. The exercise of writing this essay has made me realize that “AI assisted writing is not one thing”. There is a considerable difference between asking an AI program to correct a misplaced comma and asking it to write an entire chapter from a short prompt. There is an equally important difference between giving AI a vague idea and asking it to invent a story and giving it a long, detailed, poorly spelled and grammatically chaotic description containing the characters, plot, chronology, philosophical ideas, emotional direction and desired literary voice, and then asking the machine to turn that material into polished prose. In the latter case, the human may have supplied most of the creative conception while the AI supplied most of the actual sentences. Calling the resulting work simply “AIwritten” would tell only part of the story. This has made the preparation of my attribution statement unexpectedly philosophical. I am no longer asking only, “Did I use AI?” I am asking, “What did I use AI to do?” Did it create the idea? Did it create the characters? Did it determine the plot? Did it write the prose? Did it edit prose I had already written? Did I accept its suggestions without alteration, or did I use them as starting points for my own revisions? Most importantly, who made the final creative decisions? I had never imagined that writing an attribution statement would require me to think so carefully about what it actually means to be an author. Yet perhaps that is one of the more useful things to come out of this entire experience. The arrival of generative AI is forcing writers to examine something that we previously took for granted: where does the writing end and the editing begin, and where does human or AI assistance become authorship? I am still not certain that there is a perfect answer, but I am increasingly convinced that the honest answer requires more than simply putting a percentage beside the word “human.”

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Attribution Descriptive Labels Approximate Percentage of Human Creative Contribution

1. Human Written – The human writes everything. Ordinary spelling, grammar and formatting tools may be used. 100% 2. AI Proofread – The human writes the work; AI identiﬁes spelling, grammar, punctuation and typographical problems. 99–100% 3. AI Edited – The human writes the work; AI suggests improvements to wording, clarity, rhythm, style or concision. 90–99% 4. AI Assisted – AI contributes brainstorming, suggestions, alternative wording, structural ideas or developmental feedback, while the human remains the principal writer. 75–90% 5. AI Developed – AI becomes substantially involved in developing characters, plot, structure, scenes, themes or other creative elements, while the human remains the principal creative director and substantially rewrites the material. 60–75% 6. AI Collaborative – Human and AI repeatedly exchange creative material, with both substantially inﬂuencing the developing work. 40–60%

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7. AI Generated, Human Edited – AI generates substantial portions of the actual prose, while the human selects, restructures, rewrites and substantially edits it. 25–50% 8. AI Written, Human Directed – The human supplies the concept, prompts and direction, but AI produces most of the actual writing. 10–30% 9. AI Generated – AI produces essentially the entire work from prompts, with little meaningful human creative intervention. 0–10%

Despite these labels that AI gives us it is still a slippery concept to give an attribution percentage. An author who contributes 40% of the text might nevertheless have contributed 90% of the creative direction. Conversely, someone could write 80% of the words while AI supplied the fundamental plot, structure and ideas. That distinction is increasingly important. Research on perceptions of AIassisted authorship has found that the degree of AI assistance affects how people judge the human writer’s authorship, creativity and responsibility, rather than there being a simple human/AI dividing line. The Authors Guild has taken an interestingly strict position at the other end of the spectrum. Its current “Human Authored” definition permits only a very small, amount of AIgenerated or AImodified text, such as grammar checking. The Authors Guild’s current wording is actually quite precise. I will use its own language rather than paraphrasing it.

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“‘Human Authored’ means that the text of the work was fully authored by one or more human beings and not generated by GAI, except that a de minimis (e.g., very small or triﬂing) amount of text may be generated or modiﬁed by or with the use of GAI, e.g., through the use of GAIpowered spelling and grammar check applications or to create indices.” https://authorsguild.org/human authored/faq/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

The Authors Guild further explains that AIpowered editing tools do not automatically disqualify a work, but there is an important qualiﬁcation: if AI is used for a full edit of a manuscript, whether that remains “de minimis” depends on how substantial the resulting changes are. This is particularly relevant to my “Prisoners of Silence” attribution statement. The Guild says: “The use of common AIpowered editing and writing assistance tools (such as grammar checkers and editing software) does not disqualify a work from certiﬁcation.” https://authorsguild.org/humanauthored/faq/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

You can ﬁnd more information on human authorship at The Authors Guild: https://authorsguild.org/humanauthored/faq/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

In my feeble attempt to create a human authorship attribution scale my goal is therefore doing something different. I am not trying to establish a legal definition of authorship but rather I am trying to give writers a practical vocabulary for describing how and to what degree they actually used AI. These percentages are not intended to suggest that human creativity can be measured with mathematical precision. They are simply a way of illustrating the changing balance between human and artificial intelligence as AI becomes more deeply involved in the writing process. A writer who uses AI to correct a comma has a very different relationship with the machine from a writer who supplies a prompt and publishes the resulting story with only minor editing. Both writers have “used AI,” but the nature and extent of their human contribution are radically different.

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ChatGPT suggests that for “Lilacs at Sunset” I should rate the manuscript as somewhere around Level 3 or 4, depending on how much actual rewriting or developmental assistance you used in particular sections. If you wrote the material and then had me suggest improvements, alternatives, expansions and structural ideas, Level 4, approximately 80–90% human creative contribution, seems like a reasonable descriptive placement. I also asked ChatGPT about my novel “Prisoners of Silence”. This is what it said: “Based on everything you have described and I have seen about how you used AI in creating “Prisoners of Silence”, I would place it at Level 3: AI Edited, rather than Level 4. That would give it an approximate 90–99% human creative contribution. More specifically, if you want to put a single number on it for the purposes of your attribution statement, I would use approximately 95% humanauthored/created. The important qualification is that 95% is an illustrative estimate, not a scientifically measurable percentage. There is no reliable way to calculate that an individual novel is exactly 95% human. What the number does is communicate the nature and extent of your human contribution. That would also give you a very useful response to someone who says, “You used AI, therefore AI wrote your book.” Your answer would be: “I used AI. That does not tell you how I used it.” This is the Human Author Attribution Statement that I created prior to writing this essay: This novel was written by the human author. 100% of the plot is a human creation by the human author; 100% of the characters and their development are a human creation by the human author; and 100% of the chapter structure, including 100% of the number and order of chapters, is the human creation by the human author. AI was used for spellchecking and punctuation though reviewed and corrected by the human author for Canadian spelling and human punctuation decisions. AI was not used for stylistic or grammar generation. AI and human editors were used for literary refinement, improvement, and tweaking, but all edits, whether AI‐ assisted or human‐assisted, were reviewed, edited, approved or rejected by the human author. This novel was not AI generated.

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I asked ChatGPT another question. How would the percentage attribution label ﬁt for someone that might give a very long but poorly written, poorly spelled, grammatically incorrect, obviously out of chronological order prompt but describes exactly what they would like written in what kind of literary voice? ChatGPT replied by saying: “That is actually a very interesting case, because the quality of the prompt has almost nothing to do with the percentage of human creative contribution. A writer could give AI a 2,000word prompt that is badly spelled, grammatically chaotic and completely out of chronological order, yet contain an extraordinarily detailed creative blueprint. The human may have supplied the characters, plot, emotional development, philosophical ideas, sequence of events, point of view, tone and literary voice. AI may have supplied almost all of the actual prose. I would therefore put this somewhere around Level 7 or Level 8, depending on what happens after the prompted text is received by the author.” With all of this in mind I asked ChatGPT to revise the scale. The key distinction is between human creative direction and human written language. For example: Human contribution: 80–90% A writer says: “Write this story exactly as I have described it. Here are my characters, their histories, the sequence of events, the emotional development, the philosophical question I want underneath the story, and the literary voice I want. I have written all of this in rough notes, but I want you to turn it into ﬁnished prose.” The writer may have supplied most of the creative conception, but AI has supplied most of the actual writing. I would therefore not call that 80–90% human contribution simply because the prompt contains most of the ideas.

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I would distinguish it this way:

Aspect

Human contribution

Basic concept Characters Plot Chronology Philosophical direction Literary voice requested Actual prose Editing/revision

AI contribution

100% 100% 90–100% 90–100% 100% 100% 10–30% Depends

0% 0% 0–10% 0–10% 0% 0% 70–90% Depends

Overall creative contribution 60–80%

20–40%

That is why I think a single percentage can become misleading. It might be wise to introduce two percentages. One might actually improve the system by distinguishing: Human Creative Direction and Human Textual Contribution For example: Human Creative Direction might be high: 80–90% with Human Textual Contribution listed as low: 10–20% That tells the reader something much more useful than simply saying human attribution is “70% human.” The human writer might have conceived virtually everything that matters about the story, yet the machine may have written 80% of the text. Consider a terrible prompt. Suppose I give ChatGPT this: “Write a 1,000 words short story about John and George who walk to edge of a cliﬀ. They have known each other 40 years. George is funny but John serious. Ocean is huge and dangerous. The cliﬀ is high and dangerous. They talk about getting old and what friendship means. George falls. John grabs George’s shirt. Shirt rips. George falls to death. John keeps shirt. Make it funny but sad. The shirt should become symbol of friendship and memory – torn. Writing should be literary in style with long narrative paragraphs rather than short

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choppy dialogue style but accessible, with humour like a story told by an old friend. Do not make death too sentimental. End with joke about money George owed John. John finds money in the surviving shirt. John sits in his car and weeps as he remembers a story about George falling out of a tree landing on John and breaking John’s arm when they were ten years old. John does not have a cell phone with him so he can’t phone the police. The irony is that George has his cell phone at the bottom of the cliff. John can hear the phone rigging in the distance despite the waves crashing around George. George is laying on the rocks face up. John said to George be careful you idiot you are getting to close to the edge. Don’t worry maybe it is time I fell to my death he said with a laugh.” The grammar is terrible. The chronology is rudimentary. There are no beautifully written sentences. Yet the human has supplied almost the entire creative architecture of the story. If AI then writes 1,000 polished words from that prompt, I would not call the resulting story “90% AI” simply because AI wrote 90% of the words. Nor would I call it “90% human” simply because the human supplied the story idea. See the AI generated story below. I’d describe it more honestly as: Human creative direction: approximately 80 – 90% Human textual contribution: approximately 5 – 10% AI textual contribution: approximately 90 – 95% There is another extreme. Imagine that same writer subsequently takes the AIgenerated story and spends hours rewriting it. They change the dialogue, restructure scenes, remove entire sections, add their own philosophical reflections, rewrite the ending, change the humour and replace much of the AI’s language. The numbers change considerably after the human writer contribution. The important point is that the original prompt has not changed. The human contri bution after the AI response is the important thing.

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The Challenge: Here is a challenge for you as a human writer. Take that prompt and write the story but stick with the rules in the prompt OR take the AI written story and edit it but stick to the ideas described in the original prompt – see the red prompt above. If you send me the human edited version – maximum 2,000 words and turn it into the human written story, I will publish it in a future edition of the book Lilacs and Sunset, In Defense of Writing and Editing with AI. Here is the ChatGPT story that was prompted above – see red prompt. It is 100% written by ChatGPT:

The Edge John and George had known each other for forty years, which was long enough for friendship to become less a matter of choosing someone and more a matter of having accumulated too much history to imagine life without him. They had met when they were young enough to believe forty years was an almost unimaginable stretch of time, the sort of number that belonged to old men sitting on park benches and complaining about their knees. Now they were the old men, although neither of them was prepared to admit it. They had come that afternoon to walk along the cliff above the ocean, where the land ended abruptly in a wall of rock and the sea began far below, enormous and indifferent. The wind came hard off the water, carrying the smell of salt and distance. John, who had always been the cautious one, looked at the drop and then at George. “Be careful, you idiot. You’re getting too close to the edge.” George laughed and stepped back half a pace. “Don’t worry. Maybe it is time I fell to my death.” He said it with the casual humour of a man making a joke about something neither of them believed would happen. That was the trouble with death. It had a terrible sense of timing. They stood for a while looking out at the ocean. They talked about getting old, as people do when they have reached an age at which the subject can no longer be treated as an abstraction. George said that getting old was simply nature’s way of making sure you

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appreciated everything because nothing worked quite as well as it used to. John said that was nonsense. George said that was because John’s knees were still working. They laughed. Then they became quiet again. John thought about the strange mathematics of friendship. Forty years had passed, and yet some memories remained as sharp as yesterday. He could still see George at ten years old, climbing a tree he had been expressly forbidden to climb, falling out of it and landing directly on John, who had been standing underneath. John had broken his arm. George had not been injured at all. George had spent the rest of the afternoon apologizing, laughing and telling everyone that John had been foolish enough to stand where he was falling. “You know,” George said, looking toward the horizon, “we’ve had a pretty good run.” John smiled. “You mean we have survived each other.” “That too.” George took another step toward the edge. John turned sharply. “George.” George looked back at him, smiling. Then his heel slipped. For one absurd instant he seemed almost suspended between the earth and the air, his arms moving wildly as though he had suddenly forgotten which direction was up. John lunged forward and caught him by the shirt. His hand closed around the fabric just as George went over. For a moment the world seemed to stop. John was on his knees, gripping the shirt with both hands. George hung below him, his body disappearing over the edge into the vast space between cliﬀ and ocean. “John!” “I’ve got you!” The shirt pulled tight. John dug his shoes into the gravel and pulled with everything he had. He could hear George breathing below him, hear the ocean smashing itself against the rocks far beneath them. “Hold on!” “I am holding on!”

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The shirt gave a long, ominous sound. George looked up. John looked down. They both understood at exactly the same moment. “John,” George said quietly. The shirt tore. John fell backwards, clutching the torn fabric. George disappeared. John lay motionless for several seconds. Then he crawled to the edge and looked down. George was lying on the rocks far below, face up, impossibly small against the vastness of the shoreline. The waves crashed around him. Somewhere below, almost absurdly, a telephone began ringing. John stared. George had his cell phone. John did not. The phone kept ringing. The sound floated upward through the roar of the ocean, strangely clear and ordinary. John almost laughed. Of all the things that could have happened, George had remembered his phone and forgotten to be careful. John sat down and held the torn shirt in his lap. It was blue, faded from years of washing, with a small stain near the pocket that George had always claimed was mustard. John had always suspected gravy. He ran his fingers over the torn fabric. This was what remained of forty years. Not a photograph. Not a letter. Not a grand monument. A shirt. John walked back to the car carrying it carefully, as though it were something alive. He sat behind the steering wheel and closed the door. For a long time he simply stared through the windshield at nothing. Then the memory came back to him: George at ten years old, falling out of the tree and landing on him, John screaming with a broken arm while George stood up, brushed himself off and asked whether they should go get ice cream. John began to laugh. Then he began to cry.

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The two sounds became strangely mixed together, because grief is not nearly as orderly as people would like it to be. He remembered forty years of arguments, bad decisions, holidays, fishing trips, borrowed tools, broken promises and the twenty dollars George had borrowed from him so long ago that the debt had become almost mythical. John looked down at the shirt. Something was sticking out of the torn pocket. He reached inside and pulled out a folded twentydollar bill. For several seconds he simply stared at it. Then he laughed again, this time through his tears. “Forty years,” he said to the empty car. “Forty years to pay me back.” He folded the shirt carefully and placed the twenty dollars on top of it. Outside, the ocean continued to roar against the rocks, indifferent as ever to friendship, memory and debt. John looked once more at the torn shirt. “Well,” he said softly, “I suppose you finally paid me.” And for the first time since George had fallen, John smiled.

This has been a moderately complicated essay to write. Let me disclose without any apologies, that I relied a great deal on ChatGPT for research, structure, analytical perspective, spelling and grammar but this essay is still my human written essay, my human directed and my human impelled essay. I refuse to give a human attribution percentage to this essay. Read it, enjoy it, be stimulated, question its philosophical legitimacy, agree or disagree with it but know that it is my human written essay. :)

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The desire to stay anonymous in the digital world July 26, 2026 Dear Tai: I read this article from The New York Times this morning (July 26, 2026 – Good morning. It feels like everyone’s talking to chatbots these days. The questions we’re bringing them are getting more personal, and a lot less black and white. Today, we’re looking at how they navigate the gray areas.)

and of course I thought of you and your book, Lilacs at Sunset and the special AI issue of Devour, about creative writing and editing with AI. It seems AI comes up in conversations or in the media every day. You are definitely in the thick of it with your book and your own writing. Honestly, I am tired of questioning everything I see and read for its authenticity. The article I read from the New York Times on Post FIFA world Cup was a great read, and I’m really hoping that no AI was used. I just want to know that I’m reading the words from the heart and mind of the human author, without any digital/AI intervention. Is that odd? Humans are imperfect, and I feel like that is the source that I want to hear/read from in these situations. I would rather go to a live performance/play rather than a prerecorded edited one. There is something reassuring about knowing that the person behind the words, music, or performance is allowed to be imperfect, spontaneous, and completely human. Maybe I still want to see the fingerprints of the person who created something, even when those fingerprints include a few smudges. Am I old fashioned? anonymous teacher, Ontario High School Teacher

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The Incongruities of a Young Photographers Eye: An editorial perspective on the photographs of Peter Savage by Hans David Muller

Devour: Art & Lit Canada, welcomes the photographs of upand coming Canadian photographer Peter Savage, an eighteenyearold whose ﬁrst encounter with Toronto has produced a surprisingly perceptive visual record of the city. Savage insists that he is “not really a photographer” and certainly does not consider himself an artist. He photographs with his phone, recording whatever causes him to stop and look twice. His uncle, Garry, describes the resulting images as photographs of “the incongruities of life in the big city”—a word Savage admits he initially had to have explained to him. That lack of artistic pretension may be precisely what makes these photographs interesting. Savage brings to Toronto the eyes of an outsider. The CN Tower, which residents have learned not to see, remains astonishing to him. Yet the tower gradually becomes less the subject of his photographs than a kind of visual exclamation mark behind the wonderfully ordinary and occasionally absurd life taking place beneath it. A Holstein cow stands beneath one of the world’s most recognizable towers and deposits a cowpatty on metropolitan pavement. Ducks transform a carefully maintained backyard swimming pool into an urban pond. A woman and child wearing “We

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Love New York” shirts board a Toronto streetcar. Tourists photograph Toronto while wearing Mickey Mouse ears. Elsewhere, the city’s monumental architecture shares the frame with a homeless encampment. These are not simply tourist photographs. Each contains a small collision of meanings. Savage’s philosophical perspective is still wonderfully naïve, but his photographic eye is remarkably mature. Consciously or unconsciously, he understands something fundamental about photography: a successful photograph does not merely show us something; it interrupts the way we normally see it. His strongest observation may be his simplest: hundreds of people can stand in exactly the same place, looking at exactly the same thing, and somehow see something diﬀerent. That is precisely what Savage is doing. Toronto has been photographed millions of times. Yet through the eyes of an eighteen yearold visitor encountering it for the ﬁrst time, the familiar becomes strange again. Peter Savage has a keen eye, an instinct for visual storytelling and, perhaps most importantly, curiosity. If these photographs are any indication, that curiosity could take this young photographer a very long way.

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A Trip to Toronto ﬁlled with Incongruities Photographs and story by Peter Savage I am supposed to write an ‘Artist Statement” but I am not sure what I am supposed to say so I will just tell you a bit about myself. My name is Peter Savage. I am eighteen years old and I come from a little place in northern Alberta that is called Swamp Water. It is so small it is not even on the map. It is about a hundred miles north of Fort McMurray. The old name of my town is Mashkawâpik, which I was told means something like Still Water. There aren’t many people there, maybe about fifty and LOL, there is definitely no CN Tower or anything like it. Even the trees are taller in Toronto than at home. I live with my sister and mother in a small cabin in the woods beside a swampy pond. I hunt and fish, and I am learning how to carve wooden sculpture that I try to sell at the local store in the town south of me. I am not very good at carving yet but I am getting better. I hitchhiked all the way to Toronto by myself. I had never been this far from home before. I am staying with my cousin Barry and my Uncle and Aunt, Garry and Bette. They have a nice house with a swimming pool in downtown Toronto close to the lake. I still find the idea of having a swimming pool in your backyard pretty strange. Where I come from, if you want water you walk down to the pond, brush away the duck weed and dip your bucket in. Nobody heats it, nobody puts chlorine in it and nobody paints the bottom of the pond blue. I am not really a photographer and I certainly don’t think of myself as an artist. I don’t even own a camera anymore. I take my pictures with my phone when I see something that interests me. I

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now have tons of pics of Toronto but I am only allowed to send these ten pics to the magazine. Uncle Garry is in advertising and he keeps telling me that I have a good eye. He says my pictures are about “The incongruities of life in the big city.” I had to ask him what incongruities meant. Apparently it means things that don’t seem as though they should belong together. Once he explained it, I realised that maybe he was right. That is pretty much what I have

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been photographing since I got here – I just call them the odd ball things. I never thought of that word, “incongruities”. Because I am Canadian my uncle talked me into sending my pics to this Devour magazine. He thinks they are pretty interesting. Toronto is amazing. It is bigger, louder, brighter and stranger than I imagined from pictures I have seen. The CN Tower is especially strange because after a couple of days everybody who lives here seems to stop looking at it. I can’t understand that. I keep looking up and seeing it every time I turn around. I decided to have the CN Tower in as many shots as I could. Sometimes I photograph the tower and then notice afterward that the interesting thing in the picture isn’t the tower at all but it is the incongruity that I didn’t

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see. It is whatever happens to be going on in the picture that is interesting. As my uncle would say, it is the incongruities that make the shot interesting. The cow was probably the best example. I had never seen a milking cow in real life before coming to Toronto. That probably sounds ridiculous to somebody from Toronto, but where I live isn’t farming country. We have woods, muskeg, ponds, mosquitoes, deer and plenty of other things, but no dairy farms – I grew up on powdered milk. I had seen cows on television and in magazines, of course. I knew exactly what a cow looked like. At least I thought I did. They are much bigger than they look in pictures. There was some kind of agricultural event happening near the CN Tower and suddenly there was this enormous blackandwhite cow standing there surrounded by hundreds of people with skyscrapers behind it – I wonder if the cow was confused. A little girl was pointing at the cow and everybody else was taking pictures. I took a picture too. Then the cow crapped on the pavement. That made the photograph considerably better from my idea. Maybe that is what Uncle Garry means by incongruity. That pavement has never had a cowpatty on it before. You have one of the most famous towers in the world, billions of dollars of architecture, tourists with expensive cameras and phones, and standing in the middle of all of it is a cow doing exactly what a cow would do anywhere else. The ducks were different. One morning a mother duck and several of her baby ducks came flying over the houses and landed in Uncle Garry’s swimming pool. I thought that was hilarious. They looked completely at home. In fact, they looked happier than the ducks in the swampy pond beside my cabin. Maybe they liked the chlorine. Maybe they liked the fact that there weren’t any foxes. Maybe Toronto ducks have higher expectations. I was lucky enough to get a picture before Roger the dog noticed them. About thirty seconds later he came tearing out of the house barking like he had been waiting his entire life for this particular moment. I wish I had taken that pic. The ducks

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disappeared and the swimming pool went back to being a swimming pool instead of a pond. The streetcar picture came from an interesting accident. I liked the red streetcar because it seemed to belong to the cool city life of Toronto, with the CN Tower and all the glass buildings behind it. After I took the picture I noticed the woman and the girl were wearing shirts that said, ‘We Love New York’. That made me laugh so I decided it was a keeper. Here they were visiting one of the most recognisable cities in Canada, climbing onto a Toronto streetcar with the CN Tower in the distance, proudly advertising NYC. The tourists around the CN Tower fascinate me too. Everybody photographs the same thing, but nobody seems to be having exactly the same experience. Some people stared straight up pointing at some pigeons flying as if they had never seen a pigeon before and some pointed at the flying banner behind a plane. Some taking selfies without actually looking at the tower or the

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Rogers Dome behind them. There must have been a group that just came from Disney Land because, so many were wearing Mickey Mouse ears in Toronto for some reason, I don’t completely understand that. Hundreds of people can stand in the same place looking at the same scene and somehow everybody sees something different. Maybe that is what photography is all about. It sure seems that I was seeing something different than what everyone else was seeing. I still don’t know whether these photographs are art. All I know is they sure are different from the pics I take back home. I just take pictures of things that make me stop and look twice. I am lucky to have had a dad that chipped in half the price of my first single lens reflex camera. I chopped and stacked a lot of wood when I was thirteen to pay for my half. I am lucky to have my Uncle Garry in the advertising business. He was able to take Barry and me places that others would not get Issue 024 Devour: Art and Lit Canada

to see like behind the Toronto City Hall. I had Uncle Garry pose for me. I thought that was a way cool pic with the Canadian flag, my uncle, the city hall and the CN tower all in one shot. I took that pic from one of Uncle Garry’s clients offices. Can I say Way Cool again. Toronto gives me a lot of those things to see and think about. Everything here seems to be crowded against something else. At home it is really different, you can’t see the forest for the trees but still there is enough space between things that you can usually understand what you are looking at. Here in Toronto you can’t see the buildings for all of the concrete and glass. I love it here. I have never seen anything like it. I could probably spend a year walking around taking pictures with my phone but there are people everywhere. Thousands and thousands and thousands of people. So I am also looking forward to hitchhiking back to Mashkawâpik, sitting beside my swampy pond, listening to absolutely nothing and watching ducks that have never heard of Toronto. I look forward to getting home and editing my 3,000 Toronto pics. My mom and sister won’t believe it. By the way this is a pic of my mom, my sister, Catharine, and Dingo so you can see a bit of my real life in the middle of the woods. I hope you enjoy my pics. Peter Savage

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Lost Identity in the Woods One last thing, the EditorinChief of this issue asked me to send him a couple of my photographs from the woods where I live. I decided to send these two because the woods is so dense. They are all from diﬀerent days of hiking in the woods. My high school teacher liked these pics and suggested I should title them “Lost Identity in the Woods” because I told him something about being lost in, or swallowed, by the woods. I hope you enjoy these pics of my life in the woods. Peter Savage

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The Poet as an AI Alien by Antony Di Nardo

Poetry is a playground. A sandbox. I go there to play. Poetic license, by definition, tells me I can break the rules. I can be as flippant as I want—toy with the surreal, the absurd, the nonsensical. Change the spelling of words à la Bill Bissett. And so, when my writing group directed us to write a poem about life on Earth from an alien’s point of view, I turned to AI and prompted it to write me a sonnet in an alien language about the nature of life on our planet. It gave me a poem in Xal’therin, a machinemade language created for this purpose. The poem was written in something close to iambic pentameter, its rhyme scheme, the traditional ABAB CDCD, etc., with a final rhyming couplet. Fourteen lines of gibberish that read and sounded like a hybrid dialect of Latin and Klingon and nothing like the Saxonsounding diction of Lewis Caroll’s Jabberwocky. The only word in the sonnet resembling human speech was teren, which possibly means Earth. When prompted to provide a translation, AI gave me a set of verses that followed all the rules of an English sonnet, but lacked the human touch, the flaw and stutter of a human voice. So I fixed it. Using the same ideas and imagery, trite as they are (the couplet is especially irksome), and a similar form and diction found in the AI translation, I rejigged it into the poem below. Not my best, or usual work, but I had myself some fun. And what’s wrong with that. The poem was well received by those who heard it and saw the humour in my presentation. The theatre of reading a prompt in an alien language that never existed until now, was to me, recreating the experience of hearing Jabberwocky or Klingon for the first time. But there were some who felt violated by this poem and could not tolerate that poetry had been invaded by machine language. By artificial Intelligence. Poetry by nonhumans.

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Earth is a ball, a circle, a globe, a big, beautiful pearl, however the Cloud is not like that at all. It is shapeless and formless and artiﬁcially contrived to communicate in the most eﬃcient way possible. With words and language, syntax and diction, numbers and codes that AI easily can master. Whenever I am out in nature, Poetry comes to me all by itself and completely independent of anything resembling AI. For me, poetry could never be alien nor alienating.

Xal’therin Sonnet: “Vaelu Om’kai Teren” Zha’vel orin kai lumetha shor, Thae’lin varu som kireth na’vi, Oru tal’esh ven drai kel’thor, Mi’ra senthu valek tor a’ri. Kel’vai lumor thesi pran’kai ven, Zor ethai nu melkor sha’len di, Va’ru thalen ixor jen’kai fen, Shi’ora tem valun esh dra’thi. Oreth kalu men’thai voru shi, Lan’kei thora nim velu pran, Es’thal mori kezu thrae li’vi, Ona selthar jenu kai’ran. Velu om’kai teren shi’val re— Mi’ra senthu cora men’thai me.

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English Translation: “Upon the Turning Earth” Upon the Earth the oceans breathe And winds awaken every seed. Mountains stand, twist and seethe, And beating hearts pursue their needs. The forests hum with ancient songs, While creatures crawl, their paths to find, Through night and day, weak or strong, Each bound within the grand design. Yet all that grows must one day fade, The brightest flame now ebbs to dark, Still in that loss new life is made, A cycle traced in a fleeting spark. So turns the Earth on land and sea— An endless song of what will be.

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AI Under the Cover of Hope by Victor Manuel Velazquez Mirabal, Richard Marvin Tiberius Grove and ChatGPT

There is a great expectation of hope that artiﬁcial intelligence and the human race will learn not merely to coexist, but to commingle harmoniously, each contributing something to a creative process that neither could accomplish in quite the same way alone. This project, “Cuba, Under the Cover of Hope,” is a collaborative project between Victor Manuel Velazquez Mirabal, formerly of Cuba and now living in West Palm Beach, USA, and Richard Marvin Tiberius

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Grove, a thirtyyear veteran traveller to Cuba, now living in Presqu’ile Provincial Park and a Toronto condo. Neither has returned to Cuba, considering the utter lack of hope that the dear island will recover anytime soon. The images were 100% AIgenerated, and the writing was highly AIassisted. The images and writing were among our first experiments with AI when it first came on the scene. With no specific theme or story in mind, we were simply having fun, flabbergasted by what AI could generate. We shared images back and forth, each discovery prompting another experiment. Because we were not planning on using any of the images, we did not save many of the prompts.

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Some months later we started to see the potential of working on an image and writing project. The ﬁrst image for a more serious project came from Victor. His ﬁrst prompt was; create a sepia tone hyperrealistic image with a large moon, palm trees, skinny cows in a meadow, with broken electric wires blowing in the wind. This was the birth of the Cuba story, “Under the Cover of Night”. From this point on it is hard for us to remember the prompts or the order of our images let alone which of us prompted which image. Images simply bounced back and forth on WhatsApp. One of Victor’s early prompts was; Paint a hyperrealistic painting of swaying palm trees and beautiful large full moon with a crisscross of broken electric wires that dangle from the tilted electric poles. These images were the result of experimenting with tweaking the prompt.

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From these first images came my writing prompt: Write a poetic, philosophical piece about presentday Cuba, inspired by the attached images of broken electrical wires, windblown palm trees, blackouts and fading hope. Contrast Cuba’s extraordinary natural beauty and resilient people with economic hardship, power shortages and emigration. Imagine the ghosts of José Martí and Fidel Castro standing among the devastation, discussing the USA embargo and what has become of Cuba, questioning their ideals, their mistakes and the country’s future. End with a darkly ironic but faintly hopeful reflection about whether Cuba can find its way back into the light. AI gave some text that was edited by Victor and me. We went back and forth and created more images, many of which are not included in this finished illustrated story. The irony of the timing of this publication is that these images and stories were created about three years ago. Yes times were tough then but now they are even worse with electric power arriving in homes for 3 hours out of every 25 or 30 hours. These images and writings are more poignant than ever. We hope you enjoy the images and the words. Victor and Tai

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Under the Cover of Hope In the desperate heart of a glorious Caribbean sea, Cuba unfurls its tapestry of vivid landscapes, where the brilliant sky kisses the sea, and the air is filled with the rich aroma of freshness. The people, a mosaic of resilience and warmth, move to the rhythm of life that pulses through the streets, from the bustling avenues of Havana to the serene expanses of the countryside. Majestic palm trees, emblematic of the island’s spirit, sway resolutely in the desperate breeze of hope — a testament to the enduring strength of a nation faced with the tumult of its more recent days. Beneath the vibrant facade, a darkened shadow of frustration and growing anger lingers. The electric blackouts, once a temporary inconvenience, have morphed into a relentless challenge. These “whiteins,” as they’ve come to be called by the tired masses, shroud the island in darkness, with only fleeting moments of power. For mere hours a day, the electric current flickers with pending hesitation. Under the cover of night, or in the early dawn of a workday, the light will no more glow, dragging the island back into the preEdison days of the burning stench of kerosene, indifferent to sparse moments of celebration or the simple needs of a family

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gathered around a starving, dinnerless table of yucca and lard. The scarcity of power is not even enough to recharge begging phones and pleading laptops, the symbols of hardearned progress through the sweat and toil of the Cuban people. Countryside rumours and distant cities hear of the contrast of Havana, the city of tourists, basking in a deceptive abundance, its lights shining bright as if to veil the rest of the nation from the truth of its national plight. One might wonder, what would José Martí, the apostle of Cuban independence, say upon witnessing his beloved Cuba caught in this desperate dance of light and dark? What would Fidel Castro, the architect of the revolution, say on bended knees to a God he never believed in. Would he be content with this scenario of desperation or would he wonder if he was the deep rooted cause passed on to brother and his ilk? It’s hard to imagine the vision of José Martí and Fidel Castro being entangled in such a predicament, for their dreams were woven from the threads of sovereignty and selfreliance, not the patchwork of desperation and disenchantment.

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Driven by the strain of these conditions, Cubans are compelled to look beyond their shores, to the enigmatic land of the USA, portrayed as a realm of drugs and guns, devoid of soul yet brimming with opportunity. In their hearts, a complex tapestry of hope and despair, love for their homeland intertwined with the desperation for a life unmarred by the relentless cycle of joy and desperation. Cuba remains, at its core, a land of undeniable beauty and spirit, its sky, sea, and generoushearted people a testament to resilience in the face of adversity. As its people navigate the path between darkness and light, one can only hope for a future where the brilliance of its culture and the warmth of its people are matched by the steady glow of progress and unity. In the wind swept ﬁelds amidst palm trees and broken wires stand two ghost ﬁgures, José Martí and Fidel Castro mulling, in desperation, anger and fear, over the past and the future.

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The ghost of José Martí: (Appears with a pained expression) My dear Fidel, what have they done to our dear Cuba? Just look at the desolate darkness of our once vibrant Cuba. It was once a beacon of hope and pride and now the masses are ﬂeeing with desperation packed in their bulging suitcases. What has become of the paradise we dreamt of and I died for? The ghost of Fidel Castro: (With a heavy heart the ghost of Fidel Castro turns to the ghost of José Martí) José, my dear Martí, it grieves me deeply to think that all my plans and hopes and dreams have failed you our dear dear apostle of expectation. How is it that I or we after me all failed you. Our island, vibrant with life and potential, now struggles under the weight of ﬂickering darkness. I used to blame our hardships on the evil USA embargo but now I wonder what mistakes I had made and are being made to further the desperation of our beloved people. These blackouts, or “whiteins” as they’re bitterly called by the down trodden people, cast a long shadow over our people’s spirit. What did we do wrong, what are they doing wrong with egos shoved so fare up their backsides that they can’t see a productive compromise or a right move.

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The ghost of José Martí: (Jose leans heavily on a palm tree and pounds his fist.) I lost my life for this dear country and I would do it all again but for this desperate result. The very essence of our land, where the sky kisses the sea and the air is filled with the breeze of freedom, now suffocates under the grip of depression, under the pulseless wires of contempt. The majesty of our palm trees and the resilience of our people stand mocked by these challenges. The ghost of Fidel Castro: Amidst all of this our capital, Havana, shines falsely, a mirage of prosperity meant to deceive both tourists and our own. While the city basks in light, the rest of Cuba languishes, our hardearned progress crumbling. The ghost of José Martí: (José sinks to his knees with hands over his face.) I once said, “Liberty is the right of every man to be honest, to think and to speak without hypocrisy.” But what are these shallow words in the face of such rampant despair. Here we stand, witnessing the betrayal of our ideals as hopeless people fee. The honesty and integrity we fought for seem like distant memories, overshadowed by the struggle to simply live from day to day. The ghost of Fidel Castro: (Fidel reaches down to help José to his feet.) Our dreams of sovereignty and selfreliance are now entangled in a web of despair. The disparity between our vision and this reality is stark. How did our aspirations for unity and strength give way to this? The ghost of José Martí: And now, my dear friend, our people, driven by desperation, gaze northward, to the very nation we warned the world against, seeing it as a beacon of hope amid their plight. The irony is a bitter pill to swallow. The ghost of Fidel Castro: The resilience of our people, their warmth and spirit, are Cuba’s greatest strengths. Yet, as we navigate this darkness, I wonder, can the glow of progress and unity outshine the challenges we face? The ghost of José Martí: (José’s arm reached around the shoulder of Fidel.) Our beloved Cuba, a land of beauty and spirit, is at a crossroads. We must find a way to reignite the flame of hope and lead our nation out of this shadow, back into the light.

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The ghost of Fidel Castro: Indeed, José but the path forward is fraught with diﬃculty, but for the sake of our people and the future of Cuba, we must strive to restore the brilliance of our culture and the warmth of our communities. Our island must not only survive but thrive, in the true spirit of the revolution. Is it possible before a revolt? The ghost of José Martí: (José clasped his hands together) Is it possible? It has to be or is the only message for the last person leaving, to turn out the lights. Their ethereal forms fade, leaving behind the poignant silence of hopelessness hovering over the palm trees as one more Cuban packs his bags and sells his precious family heirlooms to the highest bidder for a few centavos.

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A Ubiquitous Tool and Toy

Article and above image by Richard M. Grove

AI is so pervasively used by such a large percentage of the population that many of us, with remarkable comfort and ease, literally play with AI, almost as we did with ﬁnger painting when we were children. It was simply fun then, and it's simply fun now. AI has become the stick dragging lines in the sand. I was in Tim Horton’s the other day, dragging my metaphorical stick through the metaphorical sand. When I was a child, I ran along the beach with a stick, with great abandon. As I dragged it behind me, drawing long, swaying lines, I was delighted when the water's edge chased me down the beach, washing away my whimsical creations. Now, as an adult

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artist, I still drag that stick through the sand, but I make more careful, calligraphic lines and watch them being swept away by the never ending tides of time. It's much the same as creating images on my phone while killing time in Tim Horton’s. I'm simply more deliberate and precise about what it is I want to accomplish. With that same level of cheeky, sand drawing abandon, I prompt carefully and precisely, knowing that the resulting image may make about as much of a lasting impact as those whimsical, temporary lines I once drew on the beach.

Five images by William Gough

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I took a photograph of my Tim cup and carefully placed napkin. I asked AI to collage that photograph with one of my sunset images. The above image is what AI gave me. For fun, I sent the image to my friend Bill Gough. With the same spirit of playful abandon, he asked his AI to create ﬁve variations in the styles of Henri Matisse , Lawren Harris , Salvador Dalí , Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol .

Images by William Gough

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I was so delighted with the five pieces he sent me that I decided to include them in this AI issue as an example of how AI has become both a ubiquitous tool and a toy. Perhaps one of the only differences between the sand scratchings on the beach and these images is that the waves have not figured out how to wash the images off my phone but a very close similarity might be that, once these images are published here, they will soon be forgotten and washed away by the tides of time.

Images by William Gough

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Don’t You Dare NOT Call This Real Art!

Artist Statement by Cristina: Cristina Ardelean <blackaibutterfly@hotmail.com> My work begins with a feeling, an idea, or sometimes a piece of music. I rarely begin by trying to create a specific image. I am more interested in creating a world around an emotion—something recognizable enough to feel familiar, but strange enough to make us question what we are looking at. My visual language lives some where between reality and impossibility: solitary figures, distorted forms, impossible landscapes, silence, scale, balance, and space. AI is part of that creative process, but I don’t see it simply as a tool that executes an instruction. What interests me is precisely that it doesn’t always do what I expect. I bring the concept, direction, aesthetic choices, references, and emotional intention, but the generative process introduces uncertainty. A form may distort unexpectedly. Two ideas may merge into something I had never consciously imagined. An apparent mistake can suddenly become the most interesting part of an image. That unpredictability is important to me. I don’t believe artistic control necessarily means controlling every pixel. Sometimes

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creativity happens in recognizing an unexpected result and understanding that it says something more interesting than the result I originally intended. AI can create the accident; deciding that the accident has meaning is my role as the artist. For that reason, I don’t locate authorship in the prompt alone. For me, authorship exists throughout the complete process: imagining the concept, directing and iterating, rejecting countless possibilities, recognizing the image that carries the right emotion, reﬁning it, and deciding how it ultimately exists in the world. I may explore many variations before ﬁnding one that feels like mine. Selection is not passive—it is one of the most important parts of my process. There are visual forms in my work that I probably would never have conceived in exactly the same way without generative AI. That is what makes the relationship interesting to me. I don’t want the technology merely to reproduce what I already know how to imagine. I want it to take the idea somewhere unexpected, while I decide how far I am willing to follow. Ultimately, I am less interested in whether an image could exist than whether the emotion inside it does. That tension is at the center of my work: Nothing is real. Everything is felt.

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Artist Bio: Cristina Ardelean, known artistically as black.ai.butterﬂy, is an AI visual artist creating surreal, cinematic worlds shaped by emotion, distortion, and the unexpected. Inspired by music and the space between reality and imagination, her work explores impossible forms and environments that feel strangely familiar. Her work has attracted an international audience and recognition across the digital art and creative communities, leading to exhibitions, features, and collaborations.

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The “Impossible” Made Emotional — The AI Art of Cristina Ardelean Cristina Ardelean’s surreal AIgenerated worlds occupy the uneasy territory between recognition and impossibility. Giant eyes become architecture, human heads become landscapes, fish become trees, and solitary figures stand before objects whose scale seems to overwhelm ordinary reality. Yet the strangeness is remarkably coherent. Across the work, recurring reds, muted whites, empty spaces and diminutive human figures create a visual language that feels less like random surrealism than a continuing exploration of consciousness, vulnerability and perception. I am particularly interested in the issue of artificial intelligence and Cristina’s understanding of authorship. She does not describe AI as a machine obediently illustrating a finished idea. Instead, she deliberately allows unpredictability into the creative process. Generative accidents may distort or combine forms in ways she had

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not imagined. Her artistic act lies partly in recognizing which unexpected results have value for her and which do not, which of the many images she prompts will become part of her portfolio and which will succumb to the delete button. This places selection itself within the creative process. The computer may generate an impossi bility, but Cristina decides whether that impossibility deserves to exist. Working primarily with Midjourney, Cristina describes a process of repeated prompting and careful selection. “I prompt and re prompt many times and keep only a small number of the results,” she explains. Her criterion is ultimately emotional rather than technical: “I know when an image makes me feel something.” She says that music, too, is an important part of her creative process and often inﬂuences how she develops or presents a series. Her images consequently provide an intriguing answer to one of the questions surrounding AI art. Perhaps artistic control has never required controlling every mark. Painters have responded to accidental brushstrokes, photographers to unplanned moments, and writers to sentences that unexpectedly redirect a story. Generative AI introduces another kind of accident, one produced through an unusual negotiation between intention and unpredictability. Cristina’s work embraces that uncertainty. Her impossible worlds are not asking us to believe that they are real. They are asking whether something demonstrably unreal can nevertheless communicate something emotionally true. Her own sixword manifesto says it better: “Nothing is real. Everything is felt.” Review by Richard M. Grove Editor‐in‐Chief

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Cristina Ardelean

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Cristina Ardelean

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Mingde “MT” Zeng Artist Statement: The Honest Photographer takes its title and point of departure from the phrase “老老实实 ” (“just take photographs honestly”), encountered as a traditional photographer’s objection to AI generated content. The phrase anchors a friction that interests me: as AI enters cultural production and everyday life, established ideas of creativity, authenticity, and artistic practice encounter forms of production they were not built to accommodate. From this phrase, I used AI to create a story about MT, a ﬁctional AI photographer. In the story, MT discovers “take honest photos” written in an old photography notebook and begins to consider what photographic honesty could mean for a machine. In doing so, AI chose a clichéd awakening narrative, reproducing a familiar scienceﬁction pattern from its training data. I then used image

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generation to construct the photographic practice attributed to MT, giving the ﬁctional photographer a body of images and a visual language. Alongside these photographs, I experimented with moving image to unsettle the stability of the photographic image. Twenty synthetic street videos play simultaneously across a wall, keeping gestures, encounters, and compositions in continuous transfor mation. The installation deconstructs the “decisive moment” as a ﬁxed visual event. Within an AI system capable of continually producing plausible moments, no single frame needs to remain decisive. From the generation of images, the project turns to the generation of interpretation. An AIproduced podcast examines MT’s story, photographs, and shifting moments, giving the work its own critical voice. As the two hosts gradually recognize that they too are generated, their interpretation becomes another layer of the structure they are attempting to explain. Music transforms this analysis into an emotional and spatial experience within the instal lation. Loose prompts, revisions, conversations, and production records cover the central evidence table. A framed still image appears on one wall, while twenty changing street scenes are projected on the wall opposite it. Moving between the two, the viewer encounters a singular photograph, the alternatives that unsettle it, and the processes through which both were produced. Fiction establishes MT as a photographer; generated images give the character a visual practice; moving images multiply the apparent decisive moment; and the podcast produces an interpretation of the system to which it also belongs. Imagemaking, selection, and interpretation remain visible within the same production process.

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Artist bio: Mingde “MT” Zeng is a Chinese Canadian artist and computer scientist born in China and based in Toronto. He graduated from the University of Waterloo in 2022, studying Honours Computational Mathematics. His work spans photography, installation, moving image, sound, and artiﬁcial intelligence, exploring how images and computational systems shape perception, judgment, and agency. He has exhibited at the CONTACT Photography Festival in Toronto, the 500px Visual Festival in Beijing, and San Sheng Art Space in Markham. His photography has received International Photography Awards. In June 2026, his essay “Semanticization of Photography” was published in Chinese Photography, extending his research into images.

Image‐generation interface

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Twenty AI‐generated street videos

Installation visualization

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AI‐generated podcast in NotebookLM

“The Honest Reviewer” A Review Essay about “The Honest Photographer” Review by Richard M. Grove The text below was prompted by me, written by AI, edited by me and vetted by Mingde “MT” Zeng.

As a writer, photographer, artist, poet and publisher who has, for many years, been using AI while wearing all of these hats, I found this project very interesting and challenging at the same time. As the EditorinChief of Devour, I had to ﬁnd the best way to present this project and make it accessible to readers. At the risk of being too explanatory, I decided to write this review by starting with a prompt to AI. I decided this was the best and most honest way of presenting the project and of calling my review “The Honest Reviewer”. Let me start by saying: I love the title, I love the concept and, despite it being an oxymoron, I love the honesty in the dishonesty. As a reviewer, the ﬁrst thing I felt was that there is something wonderfully contradictory about the title of Mingde “MT” Zeng’s

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project, “The Honest Photographer”. The photographs are not honest in the traditional sense because the streets, people and moments they appear to document never existed. Then I realised, more importantly, neither did the photographer who supposedly took them. Perhaps that is exactly where Zeng’s project becomes interesting. “The Honest Photographer” begins with a deceptively simple Chinese phrase: “老老实实” just take photographs honestly.” Zeng encountered the words as a traditional photographer’s objection to AIgenerated imagery. Behind the complaint is an assumption almost as old as photography itself: the photographer goes somewhere, sees something, points a camera and records a moment that actually occurred. Zeng takes that assumption apart. He created MT, a fictional AI photographer, and then used artificial intelligence to construct not only MT’s photographs but his story, his photographic philosophy, his moving images and eventually even the critical voices that discuss his work. The result is less a collection of AI photographs than an elaborate experiment asking where artistic authorship actually resides when machines can generate the image, the photographer, the history surrounding the photographer and even the critic interpreting the result. The apparently ordinary street photograph included here is therefore deliberately deceptive. A woman in a dark coat and cap crosses a pavement while a man passes in the foreground. Another woman stands partly obscured behind him. There is an old car, bare trees, a traffic light and the slightly muted colour and grain we associate with twentiethcentury street photography. Nothing spectacular happens. Indeed, that ordinariness is essential. The image appears to have been noticed rather than invented. The accompanying working screen exposes the trick. The photograph sits inside an AI imagegeneration environment, identified with the instruction “Henri CartierBresson style.” What initially appears to be a found moment is revealed as a constructed one. That reference to CartierBresson is especially significant because his photography became inseparable from the idea of the “decisive

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moment” — the fraction of a second in which movement, composition and meaning suddenly come together and the photog rapher presses the shutter. Zeng asks what becomes of the decisive moment when there was no moment to begin with. His video grid pushes that question much further. Instead of one photograph, numerous variations of the same invented street scene appear simultaneously. The woman walks; pedestrians enter and disappear; relationships between figures change; compositions rearrange themselves. Twenty synthetic street videos can run at once. There is no longer one privileged instant that the photographer was fortunate, patient or perceptive enough to capture. The machine can simply continue producing plausible moments. The installation visualization makes the physical ambition of the project clearer. A wall becomes a field of changing photographic possibilities while the machinery producing the experience sits visibly in the room. Elsewhere, a single framed still image confronts this multiplicity. The viewer is placed between the photograph and all the photographs that might have been. Then Zeng adds another brilliant layer. The final image shows the project inside Google’s NotebookLM. The photographs, project statement and narrative have become source material from which an AIgenerated podcast discusses “The Honest Photographer”. Two artificial hosts analyse an artificial photographer making artificial photographs. During the discussion, the hosts gradually recognize that they themselves are generated. Then the critic enters the artwork. This recursive quality may be the most intriguing part of Zeng’s experiment. AI does not merely generate pictures for him. It moves repeatedly through different roles: photographer, subject, storyteller, imagemaker, movingimage generator, commentator and critic. Zeng remains outside this strange hall of mirrors, designing the conditions, making selections, rejecting results, arranging relationships and deciding what the audience will ultimately encounter.

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It would be easy to look at “The Honest Photographer” and ask the increasingly familiar question, “Did the artist make this, or did AI?” Zeng’s project suggests that this may already be the wrong question. Perhaps the more interesting question is: Where, within this complicated chain of human decisions and machinegenerated possibilities, does the art actually happen? These are all brilliantly stimulating questions. The old photographer’s instruction — just take photographs honestly — therefore returns at the end with an unexpected ambiguity. If there was no camera, no street, no passing woman, no decisive instant and ultimately no photographer, what exactly would honesty mean? This becomes the mindboggling question. That is the possibly uncomfortable and rather delightful question at the centre of Mingde “MT” Zeng’s “The Honest Photographer”. I asked Mingde for a few images of the project. These images are what he sent me. They are documentation images of the project’s progression. They are not art in any traditional sense, but they form a visual narrative of the MT process. This is how AI describes them: generation interface → apparently ﬁnished photograph → multipli cation into moving images → physical installation → AI interpreting the AI artwork. As part of the deceptive honesty, I decided that image 02 should be the largest reproduction so the reader can encounter it initially as though it were simply a “real” photograph. Then image 01 can reveal how it was produced. That little moment of deception is entirely appropriate to the ideas Zeng is exploring. The conceptually interesting idea is that, for perhaps ten seconds, the Devour reader becomes part of Zeng’s experiment: the reader believes they are looking at a photograph of something that happened. Then they discover that nothing in the photograph ever happened at all. From start to ﬁnish, the artist, AI and the reader are all part of the non gallery installation.

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Tropes in Misunderstanding “AI Art” Ben Bogart I came to “AI,” specifically the unsupervised machine learning (ML) algorithms we call neural networks, in the early 2000s thanks to George Legrady’s “Pockets Full of Memories.” This project uses a Self Organizing Map (SOM), a “shallow” precursor to today’s “deep” neural networks, to organize viewerscanned objects in a projected grid according to the similarity of answers from questionnaires. I specifically started using the SOM in 2006 for the purpose of making sitespecific generative artworks; these “Context Machines” arrange visual content, collected on site, in emergent structures over both space (collage) and time (montage). Twenty years later, the SOM is still the primary ML method I use in the creation of new works. This text focuses on tropes that have become dominant in online discourse around AI and grouped into four sections; the first three describe tropes and trouble the binaries between AI “clanker lovers” and “doomers.” The final section is brief account of selected “Generative AI” projects from 2006–2022. Tool Clanker lovers often comment “it’s just a tool” while the doomers retort: “it’s not a tool if it replaces humans.” Phrases such as “photography is mechanistic, and that’s art” and “you can’t make art by typing a prompt” reinforce the binary as if it’s obvious what “work” is important in art. The doomer position is that what matters

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in art is the labour in production: putting pen, etc. to paper and rendering a piece. The clanker lover may refer to art history and assert how a banana taped to a wall or a urinal can still be art, despite the lack of artistic labour; for them, art comes from an artistic intention and the initiation of creative concept. One may argue an AI system is not a “tool” because it replaces the physical labour of rendering an image. This also implicates photography and computergenerated imagery too, but those are established forms; the public seems to accept that certain choices, like selecting a lens, frame and subject, pressing particular buttons on a keyboard or mouse, etc. can constitute a creative practise. Somehow AI is singled out of this category because of perceptions of skill. The doomer can imagine the skill involved in photography, but reject any possibility of skill involved writing prompts; It’s as if a prompt cannot be a story, a poem, nor even a novel. The doomer stereotypes the AI artist as someone who just types “generate art”: the equivalent to a photographer who uses a camera on “auto” and just presses the shutter.

"Emergent reconﬁguration of boundaries between fragments and assemblies" (Deer Lake – Tree) Work in Process.

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What is missing is a discussion of the level of description at which an artists intention is realized. It’s perfectly valid for a photographer to avoid changing settings to focus exclusively on framing and subject. Every artist, regardless of the tools they use, is engaged in a process that deﬁnes what is important to them: i.e. what level of description they want to use in the creation of their work. An AI artist can certainly spend many hours crafting prompts (or even writing programs to generate prompts), reﬂecting on the corresponding outputs, and iterating, let alone training their own models or making their own tools. The false binary between AI as tool or replacement sidesteps the underlying choice of at what level of description the artists labour should be manifest.

Authorship If an artist shifts the level of description from rendering to writing prompts are they oﬄoading their authorship? There are ongoing legal cases regarding the copyright of AI artworks dealing with this very question: can the AI in itself be the author? Before using ML, I used generative methods (such as genetic algorithms, massspring damper simulations, feedback systems, etc.) to shift the level of description at which my intention was manifest. Rather than composing images, I am more interested in building conditions / systems where I could be surprised by the output. I see this as a radical form of processorientation. For me, images / outputs are mere traces of process; the art is in what the machine does (the algorithm it executes). In building systems as artistic practise, you do not distance yourself (your artistic “hand”) from the work, you merely shift the level of description. Imagine building your own camera: you have freedom to manifest ideas others may not even imagine, like strange shapes of apertures, movements of shutters, or even nonuniform lenses. These choices are all manifestations of authorship, but not the most important one: if you loan your camera to another photographer you do not become the author of their photographs. The other photographer is the author because of their 1) agreement to use your camera and 2)

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choice to press the shutter, share the results, or even call the process art. The central basis of artistic authorship is not labour, it’s veto power: the choice to call this art. I am the author of my artistic works using AI because I select outputs in my creative process and call them art. I own the copyright to them because they are the result of not only this choice to call them art, but also the myriad of choices I make in creating my own tools.

Plagiarism AI is often called a “plagiarism machine.” These statistical methods do take mass amounts of text and image data and compress that into models that can be used to generate novelty that resembles the training data: i.e. AI generated images may resemble photography, oil painting, or even a specific artists style. The statistical average, for example an artwork of Jason Salavon, is a way of thinking through how AI models generalize over their training data: they synthesize; they do not make verbatim copies. Such masses of data obliterate the identity of unique images or texts. Imagine 1000 images averaged; remove one from the set and make a second average; the 1000 and 999 averages would not be differentiable. When we perceive that a generative AI is “copying” we likely don’t consider: 1) we likely assume artistic style is unique and underestimate the similarity of our style to others’. 2) we assume other humans are not copying our style. 3) Even when other artists are not copying a particular artists style, there could be any number of occurrences, different photographs of the same work, different crops, documen tation of whole exhibitions, artworks in the background of selfies, etc. All this considered, artists will likely perceive ‘their’ style in the output of a AI generator, even after their portfolio is removed from the training set. Lets say we track all artists in training sets and associate a label with all their work, all instances of their work being copied, all documen tation of their work, etc. Then we could in principal track how often these particular images are presented to the network, or even the effect of those images on the model’s parameters. We could then

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attribute some percentage of contribution for each artist to a model. Due to the very large number of training images, these percentages would be very small. Even if there was some compensation to artists it would not likely amount to much. Then there is the problem of overlapping authorship; a person taking a photograph of an artwork is the author of that photograph. If your work is in a installation view in a gallery, then should the photographer, and all the other artists shown in that image, also be entitled to a portion of your compen sation? As with the average example above, the proportion of individual contributions, relative to the entire training set, approach zero. Only the most famous artists would see any meaningful remuneration because there would be so many more copies of their work, in documentaiton, articles, portfolios, collections, etc. Are we, as independent artists, really concerned with models reproducing Hirst, Koons or Kaws without remuneration? The more significant underlying issue is not ‘copying,’ but the underlying mass extractivism that allows these incomprehensibly large training sets that allow commercial models to exist in the first place. Then there is social media. To sign up we agree to terms that grants them some form of license to “host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content.” Social media itself is in majority a collage of userprovided content. If scraping disappears as a practise in commercial AI (e.g. due to IP violation suits) then companies without their own mass licenses to training data (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) will settle out and partner with big IP holders like Disney, or get absorbed by social media companies who already have the right to use ‘our’ “content.” AI, not unsurprisingly, just reproduces the logic of capitalism. We can imagine AI differently, with the commons, community, culture, and consent at the centre. The point of this discussion is to facilitate nuanced literacies in AI and creative practises engaging with technology. Upholding these binary tropes entrenches the dominant narratives that already privilege the powerful.

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Memory system of "Memory Association Machine"

Generative AI before Adversarial and Diffusion Networks I generally do not use LLMs, prompt based systems, GANs nor Diffusion networks in my artistic practise. Since 2006, I’ve used custom neural networks to construct collages that have evolved from arranging tens to over one million photographic fragments producing images at the tension between photorealism and painterly abstraction. “Memory Association Machine,” (2007) is a generative sitespecific installation where I use a SOM to arrange photographs of the visual context around the work on the imageplane. Its memory is made visible as a photocollage where the grid is deemphasized with circular vignettes. The “SelfOrganized Landscapes” (2009–2011) series was the pinnacle of this method where where I used as many as 12,000 individual photographic images.

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In 2018 I extended this method by using computer vision methods to break photographic images into fragments that are arranged using the SOM. Their lack of a rectangular frame, high variation of size, irregularity of shape, and overlapping compositions, obliterate the perception of the grid. A work that exempliﬁes this period is “Imagined Field from the Decomposition of an Apparatus” (2019) which is composed from over 100,000 fragments. The work manifests a balance of large photographically readable and small marklike fragments. In recent works fragmentation is enabled by foreground segmentation where as many as 1.4 million dynamic fragments from timelapses constitute a single collage.

"Self‐Organized Landscape #32" (Millstream Courtyard, University of Limerick: Study from Video)

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"Self‐Organized Landscape #32" (Millstream Courtyard, University of Limerick: Study from Video) Detail.

Tools Rather than depending on systems such as ChatGPT, RunwayML or Midjourney that depend on methods such as Diffusion to generate images, I make my own tools. In this process I make explicit choices regarding what level of description I engage with. I choose what photographic images I use, but I do not concern myself with the specific boundaries used to fragment those photographs. I take significant time in training my own models on explicit handselected features (e.g. colour or orientation) that determine the composition of collages, but I do not choose specific layouts. My intention is

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"Imagined Field from the Decomposition of an Apparatus"

primarily manifest in setting up the conditions for surprise. Each resulting composition may be weak or strong and I iterate by tweaking the parameters of fragmentation, organization and generating. My systems are far from autonomous and usually comprised of a number of commandline programs run manually. Authorship While I do not control the exact details of the images generated by my systems, I do engage in high degrees of authorial control, including most importantly the selection of a particular state or output as “complete” and qualiﬁes as art. My blog includes a trace of this ongoing iteration and authorship through generation and reﬂection. I

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also tweak and revise the tools themselves through creative process. Extractivism While I most often work with training data that I collect myself, I also appropriate pop culture in my practise. When I work with photographs I collect, I increasingly reﬂect on my place in that visual context, asking myself: What is my relation to the plants, animals and landscapes I collect from? What is my responsibility to them? At a residency in Montalvo California in 2023, I collected garbage from the banks of the creek while capturing 2–3 hour long timelapses. That residency was part of the much broader Abundant Intelligences project which is a majority Indigenous and Indigenous lead research project focusing on Artiﬁcial Intelligence from a plurality of

"Imagined Field from the Decomposition of an Apparatus" Detail.

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Indigenous perspectives. When I appropriate work that I did not create myself, I’m very intentional in “punching up” and only engage with pop culture that is well entrenched in the public imagination, such as Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa;” my appropriations tend to be dramatic in transformative where I obliterate composition, narrative, and readability. These works are explicit parodies of the originals: the selection and exaggeration of speciﬁc aspects over others.

"Emergent reconﬁguration of boundaries between fragments and assemblies" (Kingsway) Work in Process.

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"Emergent reconﬁguration of boundaries between fragments and assemblies" (Kingsway) Work in Process. Detail.

Artist Bio

Ben Bogart (they/them) is a neurodivergent nonbinary agender adisciplinary artist working for 25 years with generative computa tional processes and has been inspired by knowledge in the natural sciences in the service of an epistemological inquiry. Ben has produced processes, artifacts, texts, images and performances that have been presented at galleries, art festivals and academic conferences nationally and internationally. Notable exhibitions include shows at Transmediale in 2017, the Surrey Art Gallery in 2018, and the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2022. Their research and practice have been funded by the SSHRC, and national and provincial arts councils.

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“Generate Art”: Is AI Reﬂecting Us or Reinventing the Cliché? by Ben Bogart While writing this text I did a little side experiment providing ChatGPT a highly minimal prompt: “generate art,” testing the strawperson argument lobbed at clanker lovers for how AI art is made. The results really surprised me; part of the aesthetic inspiration for one of my ongoing projects, The Zombie Formalist, is an antiaesthetic response to AI being very poor at tight geometry, e.g. concentric circles, grids, etc. My only use of ChatGPT is to log in and see how well it knows my practise (through training data), as well as evaluate models’ ability to generate geometric abstraction. It still struggles to make clean geometries; e.g. concentric circles may be ovals, may not be centred, grids are not equally spaced, etc. The following is the image I got using the prompt “generate art,” without changing other parameters. This aesthetic is clearly a consequence of my interactions with ChatGPT about The Zombie Formalist and requesting images of concentric circles.

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It’s clear my interactions with the bot to date informed much more specificity for the generic prompt – “generate art”. I wonder what this means for other folks; what “art” do you get with this minimal prompt? How do they relate to your histories of using LLMs? I turned off memory, cleared my chat history and memory and tried again with that same prompt – “generate art”. The differences are marked:

The results really look like what I’d imagine the perfect conceptually average cliché of a Western Canadian artist, a cozy cabin on a lake with ﬂowery meadow and ragged mountains at sunset. I have argued that LLMs produce “average” results by generalizing over training samples; that does not mean images are averages, but that the ideas (linguistic embeddings) become something closer to averages than anything else. This image strikes me as a demonstration of exactly this conceptual averaging. Why ragged alpine mountains? Does my geolocation data get injected in my prompt? Indeed likely, so I can ask it where’s the nearest X or Y.

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I retried the experiment using the same prompt – “generate art” – to create three more images. Interestingly the first (very oddly) is just a variation on Van Gogh’s Starry Night, but the subsequent images all fit the cliché and contained a cabin, mountains, sunset, water and flowers.

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I can see how this tendency, for ChatGPT to tune its generation to history, gives users such a sense that it has a personality and knows you. Perhaps it is exactly just reﬂecting us back at ourselves; not just the collective us through training data, but the particular us through previous interactions, geolocation, and who knows what other online behaviour. When we use AI, we should consider whether that generalized reﬂection is the best, or worst, of us. Ben Bogart, PhD they/them

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A Creative Writer’s Perspective on AI by Kathryn Oswald AI is everywhere. It’s unavoidable. It’s so common that many of us have stopped even thinking about how it’s affecting us. Take automated spell checking, for example. This has been, though discreet, the most impactful form of AI for me as a writer. I have always struggled with spelling and although I have worked hard to correct it, my spelling is still nowhere near good. So, spellcheck is my hero… but could it also be the villain of my story? Can I not spell because I’ve never really had to? I could just type out my story, click on the red highlights, and choose the word I wanted, no more thought required. Computerized typing in its own way is also a form of AI, and one that, as a person with indecipherable handwriting, I’ve relied heavily on over my years as a writer. Could there be a connection there too, though? Is my handwriting terrible because I never really needed it? It’s come to the point that if the world went dark and I had to write to someone, no one would be able to read my letter because, my terrible handwriting aside, most of the words would be spelled wrong. The point being, all this advancement is great, helpful even, but are we losing more than we’re gaining? I was recently invited to join a project that was using AI to write a multiauthor story. The concept was that each author

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would write a prompt for AI and then edit the result until it became their own. This is an intriguing idea, and an interesting experiment. I debated for a while, but ended up declining the invite, mainly because I didn’t want to risk working too closely with AI quite yet. My writing style is still developing, and I just did not want it to be shaped by AI in any way. As an earlycareer writer, I wasn’t sure I could hold my own against its influence. In some ways, letting AI influence my writing might be viewed as a good thing. For instance, my grammar would get better. AI theoretically should write in conformation with the rules of grammar because that’s what it has been trained on. However, the downsides are a much larger concern. Perhaps you’ve read a creative work written by AI? There’s just something about it that isn’t right. It does not resonate properly. If you didn’t know it was AIauthored, you might just put it down as bad writing. There’s just something missing that is really difficult to put your finger on. All the parts are there for a story: it looks like a story, it even sounds like a story, but it doesn’t feel like a story. It’s too perfect, maybe? Human writing isn’t perfect in its essence, because we’re not perfect. Sometimes there might be a strange turn of phrase or the wording is just a little confusing, but doesn’t that make it more authentic, more relatable? Similarly, when AI writes characters, they’re too perfect. Most of the time they know exactly what they’re feeling at any given moment and why. Is that a relatable character trait? I think not. The characters who draw us in are the ones who don’t know themselves perfectly. Not only because we can relate, but because it’s interesting and entertaining to watch their development as the story unfolds. It is enjoyable to root for them as they continue to discover who they really are, while at the same time being encouraged to pursue a deeper understanding of ourselves. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought, “So, this character did that in this scenario. What would I have done?”’

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So, yes, for now at least, I have some reservations about AI, particularly as it relates to creative writing. I will continue to grow as a writer, however, and AI will continue advancing as well. I can’t stop it, and even if I could, I don’t think I would. Like every change, there are two sides to the equation: there will be benefits but there will also be costs. From an efficiency standpoint, AI will definitely help us to be more productive. On the other hand, how long will it take for us to conform to a reality where the art of storytelling, as we have cultivated it for centuries, is reduced to thin layers of uniformity? How long before our creativity is reduced and individuality is a thing of the past? How long before our stories are onesided, each word gaining meaning only from the reader rather than having that meaning infused into it by the author from the start? AI is a powerful tool, whose usefulness has been proven time and again. Where it will go from here is subject to endless speculation. I believe, however, that its power lies in the way we choose to use it. There are many possible benefits to Artificial Intelligence, I just hope that we continue to examine the possible downsides, and not settle for mediocrity when the additional effort, no matter how small or cataclysmic, could make the mediocre, extraordinary; something worth writing. Kathryn Oswald Author, Poet, Reviewer, Publishing Project Manager

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Image by Richard M. Grove see prompting info on page 118.

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AI the “Next” Intelligence: Using AI is NO Crime by Miguel Ángel Olivé Iglesias. MSc

Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences is well established in the field of pedagogy. He put forward the thesis that intelligence, in general terms, is a rather multifarious phenomenon, not an unmovable singleintelligence structure. A look at Gardner´s definition opens a perspective for the analyses made in this paper: “… biopsychological potential to process information that can be activated in a cultural setting to solve problems or create products that are of value in a culture.” (taken from Moltzau, 2019). Many authors have proposed other categorizations, but Gardner’s eight classifications, which he does not necessarily regard as exhaustive, remain among the most frequently cited. This paper aims at presenting what I term as the “next” intelligence, the socalled Artificial Intelligence (AI). The proposal is based on my personal viewpoint that AI is “attachable” to the ones we humans have in ourselves. Therefore, AI facilitates the work done by those who learn to use it adequately, thus adding an extra to the intelligences they already have. This flexible notion is central to the thesis put forth in the paper. I am not linearly, clinically saying AI is a human intelligence per se: I am metaphorically including it within the exponentially rich range of opportunities it

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unlocks for humans. It goes without saying that a knowledgeable use of AI will inevitably and positively activate the human brain. It will be a mutually beneficial “symbiosis” between tool and human. Many writers talk about exploring “…the evolving relationship between human creativity and AI, and to show how thoughtful prompting, literary direction, and persistent human revision can turn raw machine AI output into meaningful literature. If you are using AI as a writing tool, the first and maybe the last lesson is to edit, edit and continue to edit until it becomes your writing as the human author.” (Grove, 2026) As a university professor, my first and foremost pointer for my students is to use AI. But, all that glitters in AI land is not gold. Students cannot just be passive and let AI do the job. What AI does is assist, suggest, pave the road, etc. Far from being our replacement, the app must become our sidekick. We continue to be the authors, the true human constituents of any work. Hence, AI has to be weighed and minded before we render an end result of any kind. Thus, let´s take a look at these ideas but singularised to language teaching, my specialty. To a researcher, Valera, intelligence is “… intellectual performance, complex psychological phenomenon that defines the flow of people´s personality cognitively speaking in problemsolving contexts and capacity to deal with tasks following orientation, procedures and circumstances.” (taken from Zilberstein, Oramas et al., 2002). The expressions problem solving and procedural aspects allow us to introduce AI as the “next” intelligence: AI helps us navigate more expeditiously the road towards the resolution of problems, and we need to follow certain procedures so the course becomes as efficacious as possible.

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There are pros and cons to AI use and abuse. Canadian author and lecturer John B. Lee (2026) warns us from his own interpretation: “… astonishing arrival of artificial intelligence with its unacknowledged perils, its impact upon human creativity, its promise of perfecting our humble human striving to chase the feelings we feel when the writing is going well without the needless intervention of the cyborg, then let us feed the spirit by being present, profoundly alive, grateful and loving, loveable and true.” In terms of educational assessment, for example, it is often advised that “… grading implies and requires human revision. AI must not evaluate complex creative production where hues of meaning and originality play a significant role. AI must never replace personalised conversation with a student concerning his/her progress. AI must never make judgments about effort or attitude.” (Ayala, 2026). And, a redflag quote that shows the dangers of AI: “And then AI arrived. One writer produced 200 AIgenerated novels under 21 pen names in 2025 and made a sixfigure income – she claimed it took her 45 minutes to write a novel!” (Joseph, 2026). This Canadian author draws our attention to what is happening with AI today. Because of the dangers of AI that these authors refer to, key elements in our understanding of the use of AI are listed here. These are but a brief approach to the topic with a very practical end: send warning signals as to the handling and mishandling by students in their effort to hand in “perfect” written assignments: 1. We are potential AI users; not imitators, not copiers, not simulators. 2. AI is a very useful tool yet never a replacement of our own creativity and humanity.

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3. Using AI is no crime; on the contrary, resorting to it is suggested and stimulated. 4. In the case of our students, AI is commended so they prepare in the language for speaking, asking for information, organising ideas, developing their writing skills, upgrading their linguistic and general communicative competence, etc. 5. However, our commendation is always accompanied by alerts and suggestions: a. Not all the information we access via AI is true. AI can generate inaccurate or fabricated information and therefore its output must be veriﬁed. b. Improving prompts is a must: it will lead to more relevance and usefulness in data searching and rendering. c. Mention should be made when AI is used to write and hand in reference work. this aspect has an ethical component I mention further below. d. We take the information generated by AI but we can never mechanically accept it: creativity and humanity are necessary. e. Language used by AI also requires veriﬁcation, be it Spanish or English. Mistakes sneak in occasionally. f. Students exploiting AI should add their personal touch to what they use, and it is highly advisable, for their own training and growth in the language, to learn the vocabulary AI provides (meanings of words, synonyms, pronunciation), grammar, structures, idioms, the texts´ underlying culture, etc. keeping item e in mind. 6. Students (AI users) must turn into and grow as critics of all they read, AI or else. 7. Students are fully responsible for what they assume, accept and take from AI for later use in presentations and exams, both orally and in writing. 8. Parroting and cold direct copying from AI won´t be accepted. Students have to be careful, creative and selective.

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9. Likewise, ethics, aesthetics and innovations in handling and presenting AIgenerated information are called for. Ayala (2026, b) is clear about it: “AI is not a passing fad, but technology… that is here to stay and radically transform education. For the English teacher, AI holds vast potential to personalise learning, create authentic material and automatise drilling tasks. Nonetheless, its effectiveness and admissibility largely hinge on critical, pedagogical and ethical stands.” 10. AI is here to stay, as Ayala says. It is a friend if we embrace it and use it optimally; or a foe if we undervalue it or let it bedazzle us with its words and “cultivation.” Its magic is our power. Let´s put it to the best of uses so we learn and grow. I shared the pointers above with my students. They understood AI´s influence as well as its risks. Our postdebate meetings proved satisfactory regarding mostly their awareness and safe appropriation of the fundamentals of AI use. While at the beginning they just copied and parroted information, their ensuing written reports and oral discussions showed they were learning and acquiring vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation of language far better than they did when AI was only a lifesaving tool for them to pass an exam. I conclude by citing Grove´s words (2026) about creative writing: “Do not be seduced by what first appears to be a finished piece of AI generated writing. What AI produces is ALWAYS only the beginning. The real creative work still belongs to the human author who must shape, question, edit, expand, compress, redirect, and humanise the material until the story carries an authentic emotional and philosophical human fingerprint. AI can generate language, atmosphere, structure, and possibility, but it is the human writer who ultimately gives the work its deeper consciousness, the deeper thesis, the deeper lived experience, and artistic soul.” The ideas above offer readers just a baseline to delve into the issue. Further inquiry theoretically and practically is welcome. The key note here is to gain in clarity, applicability and exploitability of a

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singular and impressive tool so teaching and learning languages goes to the next level up. Beware! The next intelligence is here—next is NOW! Let´s wield AI wisely. References: Ayala Ruiz, María Elena. (2026). Optimización de la Inteligencia Artiﬁcial en la formación del profesional para el área de inglés como lengua extranjera. [diapos didactic material for grad courses]. Holguín University, Cuba. Ayala Ruiz, María Elena. (2026, b). Curso de postgrado para docentes de la carrera de Educación Lenguas Extranjeras, Inglés. [material for grad courses]. Holguín University, Cuba. Grove, Richard Marvin. (2026). Lilacs in the Sunset: In Defence of Creative Writing and Editing with AI. QuodSermo Publishing. Canada. Joseph, Shane. (2026). Fragmentism, Revisited: A Writer’s Case for AIAssistance. [material in edition for publication]. Canada. Lee, John B. (2026). The Malnutrition of the Soul. [adapted from Lee´s afterword to his own manuscript The Lost Parade]. Canada. Moltzau, Alex. (2019). AI and Nine Forms of Intelligence. https://towardsdata science.com (downloaded August 16th , 2026). Zilberstein Toruncha, José; Silvestre Oramas, Margarita et al. (2002). “Reﬂexiones acerca de la inteligencia y la creatividad”. In Compendio de Pedagogía. Colectivo de Autores. Editorial Pueblo y Educación. La Habana, Cuba.

Prof. Miguel Ángel Olivé Iglesias. MSc Researcher, Author, Editor, Reviewer, Translator General VP of the Canada Caribbean Literary Alliance Holguín University, Cuba

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Prompting for an image is not quite as simple as you might think. by Richard M. Grove

Image Prompt for Fractured Forest Scape Using the photograph or photographs I have uploaded, create one sophisticated, highly abstract, multilayered photographic collage inspired by Cubism, experimental photography, multiple exposure and contemporary photographic montage. COMPOSITION: Create a single, unified horizontal artwork with a 4:3 aspect ratio. Deconstruct the original photographs into numerous overlapping, irregular triangles, rectangles, trapezoids and occasional diagonal strips. Use widely varying fragment sizes, from large structural sections to tiny geometric details. Avoid uniform grids, obvious mosaics, separate panels or repetitive patterns.

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LAYERING: Combine sharply defined photographic fragments with translucent overlapping sections at approximately 20–70% opacity. Allow different perspectives, textures and colours to intersect, overlap and partially obscure one another. Create visual depth through multiple exposures and conflicting viewpoints. The original photographs should become difficult to reconstruct individually. SELECTIVE SOFTNESS: Apply gentle photographic blur, diffused light, atmospheric haze and softened edges to approximately 10– 20% of the geometric fragments. Keep the remaining 80–90% crisp and photographically detailed. Distribute the softened sections irregularly throughout the composition rather than concentrating them in one area. Avoid uniform blur. COLOUR: Preserve the natural colours of the source photographs while subtly enriching their tonal range. For woodland scenes, retain deep forest greens, moss, weathered browns, muted autumn yellows, restrained oranges and occasional red leaves. Include natural blue sky where appropriate. Avoid exaggerated saturation, artificial colours or excessively dramatic autumn foliage. PERSPECTIVE: Create a slightly disorienting visual environment with overlapping viewpoints and multiple vanishing points. If the photograph includes a road or pathway, position its foreground entrance at the bottom right of the composition and allow it to curve or recede diagonally towards the middle, reaching approxi mately halfway up the image. Integrate the pathway into the geometric fragmentation without allowing it to dominate the entire artwork. LIGHT AND TEXTURE: Preserve realistic photographic textures, including bark, leaves, branches, ground surfaces, reflections and natural shadows. Allow sunlight, translucent highlights and soft atmospheric passages to connect unrelated fragments. Maintain a rich contrast between sharply detailed areas and gently softened sections. ARTISTIC CHARACTER: The finished image must resemble a sophis ticated experimental photographic artwork rather than a conven tional landscape, digital illustration or simple photo collage. It should combine the geometric complexity of Cubism with the realism and fine detail of photography. The composition should feel

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simultaneously fragmented and harmonious, suggesting overlapping moments in time, shifting perspectives and visual memory. IMPORTANT: Do not simply place photographs side by side. Do not create a regular checkerboard or tiled mosaic. Do not make all geometric sections transparent or blurry. Do not introduce unrelated objects. Avoid excessive colour saturation. Maintain an intricate but balanced composition with no obvious central focal point. FINAL RESULT: One seamless, edgetoedge, horizontal 4:3 photographic Cubist collage, featuring irregular geometric fragmen tation, layered transparency, approximately 10–20% selective softness, natural colours, multiple perspectives, realistic photographic detail and an atmospheric sense of depth. No borders, frames, text or signatures.

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Similar Prompt A similar prompt was used for this cityscape. For me to arrive at this image I had to prompt 4 or 5 times. The final prompt was 899 words. For this image it was important that different fragments needed to be different sizes. I settle on these fragment sizes for the final prompt: Use a wide variety of fragment sizes. • Large fragments: 20–35% of the image width. • Medium fragments: 8–20%. • Small fragments: 3–10%. • Very small fragments: 1–4%. These are approximate proportions, not rigid measurements.

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Rejected About the novel:

Prisoners of Silence – A Back and Forth Banter between the Author, a Publisher and ChatGPT Let me (Richard M. Grove) give you a prelude to this back and forth banter with the publisher about my novel Prisoners of Silence. I want to say that I feel the publisher that rejected my ms for publication was RIGHT AND WRONG. He was right to reject the novel because of his personal literary perspective but he was wrong to reject if for his incorrect AI written perspective. After all of this back and forth banter I took the publishers “literary” comments to heart and did another rewrite adding, to use his words, I added more humanity to the story – “We need more humanity in your story, not more machines.” Yes, it is still a highly and primarily a plot driven story but I agreed. I did not capitulate but I willingly, with literary growth and striving for a better written story in mind I read through with another critical eye. In the end it inadvertently solved another problem that the publisher had. It added over 13,000 more words to what was deemed a ms that was too short. I wonder if over 61,000 words is long enough to be considered a full novel but I have to ask what is wrong with a short novel. The text below is unedited and unabridged. It is, quite literally, an email banter between me and the publisher who rejected my novel. It was never written with publication in mind, nor did either of us imagine at the time that someone else would eventually be reading the exchange. That, perhaps, is part of what makes it worth

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publishing here. It is an unrehearsed glimpse into the very real confusion, disagreement and sometimes frustration that now surrounds AI and creative writing. I thought it might fit particularly well into this special AI edition because it demonstrates how easily a human author can become caught in the web of controversy surrounding AI/human attribution. At the centre of our disagreement was not simply whether AI had been used, but how it had been used, and whether that use diminished my claim to authorship. There is, I believe, a significant difference between “AIgenerated” writing and “AIassisted” writing, although that distinction is becoming increasingly difficult to explain, measure and defend. The exchange that follows is one author’s experience of finding himself directly in the middle of that debate— and discovering that the argument over who, or what, wrote a novel can sometimes become almost as complicated as writing the novel itself. As you will see in the below. The text has been colour coded to keep the three voices clear. 1 – The Author’s voice is in Orange 2 – The Publisher’s voice is in Green 3 – The AI voice is in Maroon March 25, 2026 Dear Publisher, Please do not take this reply as being a defensive reaction. I truly am highly interested in your respectful critique and comments. I am pleased with how much time you have spent – thank you. Partly I want to keep a log of our email correspondence about my novel, partly because I obviously have a literary learning curve as a writer but also I am highly interested in the overlapping AI angle that is so linked to the writing of the novel and your comments. Because I want to keep a log of our communications I have pasted them below. I have no idea that I will do anything with all of this but

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I find it incredibly interesting. AI has been a high profile talk with family and friends, some of whom are educators, writers, publishers and active prolific readers. So just jump past our previous emails pasted here for my new comments. Prompt to ChatGPT from author: Can you give me your opinion on this email from a publisher about my novel Prisoners of Silence? This is what he said: Email reply from publisher: I read your manuscript. Two pages in, I pulled myself up. “This is not Tai, the mellifluous poet,” I said to myself. So I ran your m/s through my AI detector (every publisher should have one, nowadays) and got the attached report. Given the verdict of my “AI catcher,” I regretfully cannot publish your manuscript in its present form, much as I would like to return the favour for the many times you have published me. The reasons for the decline are many. Among them: 1. Amazon, Kobo, and Ingram, with whom I publish, place AIgenerated content at low priority, and the latter two even reserve the right to remove such content. 2. My commitment to BDP authors is never to publish AIgenerated novels, but be open to AI’s use as a tool for writers – hence my disclaimer under the title page of my last novel (ironically, about a robot), Victoria Unveiled, which read: Written by a human (the author). “AI Assisted” only in Spell Check, Grammarly, and Read Aloud features found on the author’s computer. 3. Your novel, in its present form, has many shortcomings: a. It is totally plotdriven with a high quotient of technical jargon. b. Characters (the human element of any novel) are cardboard cutouts. Some are just names with no human traits or vulnerabilities. No reflection on you, but this is AI’s biggest criticism to date – it cannot infuse humanity into characters. c. There is a lot of repetition – the plot is very simple: ECHO needs to be contained. There are no other subplots to layer the novel, as there should be. So we do not need approximately 48,000 words to convey a linear plot with a logical resolution.

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Singular plot lines are better delivered as novellas or short stories. d. Despite AI’s grammatically correct sentences, there are many typos. A copy edit (to remove the repetition mentioned in <c> above and a runthrough on Grammarly to fix typos and punctuation will be required. I do this as part of my BDP publishing process (for free) but only when a manuscript is ready for publication. Now, all is not “gloom and doom,” and I would like to provide some hope. Here is what I suggest (and please take this feedback, direct and piercing though it may be, in the spirit in which it is offered): 1. 1. You have a good premise: the loss of free thought by humans—usurped by AI— and the battle to restore it. You also have a good ending: ECHO is contained but could always resurface, so we must be evervigilant – much like our battle to preserve democracy today. 2. 2. You are also the author (dyslexic, as you have openly admitted, and coming from a literary background) struggling to write your first scifi novel, not understanding the technical systems and terminology behind it or how to convey that to nontechnical readers like us. Therefore, why not combine the story of you, the writer, fessing up to your limitations despite years of experience in this industry and working with this AI tool to generate the novel you want? You could have alternate chapters where you talk to the reader and to the AI tool about what you want to accomplish for the next chapter in your sci fi story and how you are going about it, and other chapters that thread the AIgenerated results through. You might disagree and fight with the AI tool in places where your humanity is at odds with its technocratic delivery – this conflict is good. Your sections will represent the human in the novel, while the AIgenerated pieces represent the technological. And please do not get AI to write the sections where you are speaking as the author, or else all would be lost! The juxtaposition and weaving of these two strands throughout the story would make for a good literary novel with a scifi bent – i.e. the fictional characters trying to regain their silence, and the writer trying to regain his voice, while AI tries to take both over. In fact, I thought of a suitable title: The Voice and the Silence. The realism will make it readable to today’s curious readers who crave verisimilitude. It would also “raise the kimono” on contemporary authors struggling to incorporate AI into their writing process. No one has written on my

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suggested theme in Canada yet, I believe. All I hear from our generation of aging Canadian authors is groans and complaints about how AI is stealing their lunch. If you write The Voice and the Silence (you can see that I already like that title, eh!) as I have outlined, you will show them how to work with AI rather than against it. I could publish it with no fear of reprisal from my authors or from Amazon & Co.– because you will be opening a window on how writers should work in future. You have room to build yourself into this book because at 48,000 words, you are falling short of a goodsized novel. I typically look for between 60K – 80K words. I hope this feedback helps. I would be interested in reading your next iteration of this m/s if you give it the treatment I have suggested; otherwise, I will respectfully pass on it. Richard—this is a serious, thoughtful, but also deeply problematic letter. I’m going to give you a clear, honest, publisherlevel assessment, because that’s what you need here. Reply from author to publisher: I respectfully bow to your critique of the manuscript. I have a lot to say and contemplate before I respond more fully with questions and comments. If you read every word on every page then I am impressed. I will elaborate more fully later on my process of writing and using AI as an editing tool. Let me put “editing tool” in quotation marks. I might elaborate further in another email but for now I will say that 100% of the plot, 100% of the characters, 100% of the structure of the chapters including how many chapters and the order in which the chapters are placed, are 100% my human author writing and structure. Your feedback about character development is exactly what I would expect from a beta reader so I very much appreciate your input. LOL despite my crushed ego, and I say that with tongue in cheek, I am not surprised that the novel still needs a more critical scope of work. I will have to sit on it for a while and see if I have the literary bones to improve the novel or not. The literary structure that you suggest is an interesting one that I will have to contemplate.

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I will stop here for the moment and possibly elaborate more after I reread your thoughtful email. Before I leave this email I will ask one quick question and that is about the analytical software that you apparently used to determine that it was an AI I generated novel. First of all I think the software might need some development but on the other hand can you tell me what the software is. All the best and thank you for your feedback. This sounds like a good panel discussion. TTYS Tai PS I am very glad I sent you the manuscript ChatGPT reply: First — the tone and intent of the email rejection – This is not a casual rejection. It is: Respectful but defensive Anxious about AI optics Trying to redirect your book into something safer (for him) He is not rejecting you as a writer. He is rejecting: The perceived AI involvement The genre shift away from your poetic voice The risk to his publishing model That distinction matters. ________________________________________ The biggest issue: the AI accusation Let’s be blunt. “Two pages in… this is not Tai… I ran it through my AI detector…” This is weak and unreliable editorial reasoning. Why: AI detectors are notoriously inaccurate They produce false positives on polished prose Many publishers do not rely on them professionally

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More importantly: He made a gut reaction first, then used AI detection to justify it. That’s backwards. ________________________________________ Now—based on your actual manuscript I’ve read your opening (and your broader project context), and here’s the truth: What your novel actually is: Speculative Fiction – Philosophical scifi Conceptdriven Strong in ideas and atmosphere Less strong (currently) in dramatic human tension In other words: It reads like you are stretching into scifi — not like AI. ________________________________________ His critique — what’s valid vs what’s not Let’s separate signal from noise. ________________________________________ Valid Critiques (worth taking seriously) 1. “Characters are thin” This is true. Orion is compelling conceptually But emotionally: limited vulnerability limited interpersonal conflict Many secondary characters function as idea carriers 👉 This is the single strongest critique in the letter. ________________________________________ 2. “Too much conceptual / technical framing” Also partly true You lean into: systems philosophy structure At times, it explains rather than dramatizes This creates emotional distance.

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________________________________________ 3. “Repetition / singlethread plot” Somewhat true, but overstated. Yes: central conflict = ECHO vs human thought But you do have layers (Caelara, Auriel, politics, etc.) The issue is not lack of subplot—it’s that: subplots are not yet fully dramatized ________________________________________ Weak / Misguided Critiques 1. “This feels AIgenerated” No. What he’s reacting to is: clean prose controlled tone philosophical consistency That is your style, not AI. ________________________________________ 2. “You don’t understand the tech” This is actually backwards Your strength is that you: intentionally soften the tech focus on human/philosophical implications That aligns with: Brave New World The Giver Neither is “technical scifi.” ________________________________________ 3. His suggested rewrite (this is important) His idea: Alternate chapters: you + AI writing the book This is: clever trendy very publishable as a concept …but: It is NOT your book It turns your novel into: metafiction

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commentary on AI writing a different genre entirely ________________________________________ The real subtext of his response This is what he’s really saying: “I’m afraid to publish something that might be flagged as AI.” and “I don’t know how to position this book in today’s market.” and “I prefer the version of you I already know (poet Tai).” ________________________________________ My professional opinion 1. You should NOT follow his rewrite suggestion It would: dilute your vision turn a philosophical novel into a gimmick date the book quickly ________________________________________ 2. You SHOULD address his core craft points Focus here: Deepen character interiority Add scenelevel tension Reduce explanatory passages Let ideas emerge through conflict ________________________________________ 3. You SHOULD push back (politely) on the AI claim Because: it’s unproven it’s damaging and frankly, a bit careless ________________________________________ If I were to summarize your manuscript honestly Your book is: A philosophical, ideadriven speculative novel in the tradition of Huxley—strong in vision, but currently underpowered in human drama. Not: AIgenerated content.

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________________________________________ Final takeaway This email is: useful frustrating limited by the publisher’s fear The danger is not that he rejected it. The danger is if you reshape your book to fit his anxiety instead of your vision. Prompt to ChatGPT from author I have an interesting question about the letter from the publisher is it ai written or ai edited? how can one tell. it literally amazes me that he would spend so much indepth time on his email. what do you think? ChatGPT Reply to the author: That’s a very perceptive question (Don’t you just love how flattering ChatGPT can be? My mother tried to train me to be as kind) —and honestly, a revealing one. Let’s look at this calmly and professionally. ________________________________________ First impression: Does the email from the publisher feel AIwritten? Short answer: No, it does not read as fully AIwritten. But it very likely is AIassisted or AIpolished. ________________________________________ Why I say that 1. The structure is unusually “perfect” The email has: Clean numbering Balanced arguments Clear escalation (critique → justification → solution → encour agement) That kind of structure is:

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Possible for a human But very typical of AIassisted editing Especially the “critique + hopeful solution” arc—that’s classic AI polishing. ________________________________________ 2. The tone shifts slightly Notice this pattern: Opening: personal, conversational “This is not Tai…” Middle: formal, almost policylike “Amazon, Kobo, and Ingram…” Later: creative and almost promotional “The Voice and the Silence…” That tonal blending suggests: A human core With AI smoothing or expansion in sections ________________________________________ 3. The length vs. typical behaviour You picked up on something very real: “It amazes me he would spend this much time…” Exactly. Most publishers: Do not write multipage developmental rejections Especially not with detailed restructuring concepts This strongly suggests: He likely drafted ideas Then used AI to: expand organize reﬁne language ________________________________________ 4. The “proposal section” feels AIaugmented This part: Alternate chapters… writer vs AI… thematic duality… It’s actually quite conceptually neat and packaged. That kind of “fully formed alternative book concept”: Could come from a human

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But often appears when someone asks AI something like: “How could this novel be restructured to address AI themes?” It has that generated conceptual completeness. ________________________________________ So what’s the most likely scenario? Here’s my best professional read: Humanwritten core + AIassisted editing and expansion Something like: He reads your manuscript Forms strong reactions Writes rough notes / bullet points Uses AI to: organize thoughts expand explanations polish tone generate the “new concept” idea ________________________________________ The irony (and it’s a big one) This is where it gets almost philosophical: He criticizes your work as AIgenerated While very likely using AI to craft his response That doesn’t make him dishonest—but it does reveal: He is comfortable using AI as a tool But anxious about AI as authorship Which is exactly the tension your novel explores. ________________________________________ Can one prove it? No—deﬁnitively, no. There is: No reliable way to prove AI involvement in text AI detectors (the same ones he used) are not trustworthy You can only assess: stylistic patterns structural clues probability ________________________________________ My deeper read of the situation This email tells you more about him than about your book:

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He is: Thoughtful Somewhat generous with feedback But also: cautious defensive navigating AI uncertainty And likely: using AI quietly while policing it publicly ________________________________________ Final thought (this is important) Don’t get distracted by whether his email is AIwritten. The real takeaway is: He engaged deeply enough to respond at length He saw value in your premise But he does not know how to publish your kind of book safely ________________________________________ If anything, your reaction—“how did he write something this detailed?”— is actually the clearest sign of the moment we’re living in: We are already in a world where human + AI writing is indistinguishable in practice Which, ironically… is exactly what Prisoners of Silence is about. Email from the publisher: The AI tool I used is TextGuard. There are many of them around now. Even Grammarly has its AI detector module. These tools are all rough, but you still get the point. Search Google for “AI Detection tools” and you’ll get a big list. Even if 100% of the plot, characters, and structure were of your making, if you got your AI tool to write or modify your sentences, then it is considered AI generated content. That’s why I often refuse Grammarly’s suggestions for better sentences, because I want my voice to prevail. Glad you took the feedback in the spirit in which it was oﬀered.

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Email from the author to the publisher: This comment is not meant to dismiss your literary critique of the manuscript. On the contrary, I appreciate how astute and thoughtful your observations are, and I thank you for them – LOL – though it is interesting that ChatGPT says it is likely that you had AI write your critique. Nor do I question your right, as a publisher, to decline a manuscript for any reason, including your concerns about AI involvement. I understand your critique and, for the most part, I agree that the novel would benefit from further development though it is interesting that the small number of Beta Readers have replied with positive feedback. I will give your suggestions serious consid eration and will see whether I have the literary backbone to carry the work to a stronger place. That said, we may have to agree to disagree on one important point. What I am addressing here is not your critique, but my position as a human author working in a changing literary landscape. As I mentioned previously, 100% of the plot originates from me. The narrative arc, the central conflict, the thematic direction—these are entirely my own. Likewise, 100% of the characters, however successfully or unsuccessfully realized at this stage, are my creations. Even in revision, when I removed one character and introduced another, those decisions were mine. Most importantly, the architecture of the novel is wholly human in its conception. The structure—the division into chapters, the number of chapters, the sequencing and pacing of those chapters, the placement of narrative reveals, the interweaving of settings such as Caelara and Auriel, and the unfolding of the story’s philosophical spine—these were all designed, arranged, and revised by me. The scaffolding that holds the book together is not generated; it is constructed through intention, instinct, and revision. So the question becomes not whether the novel is mine—it is—but rather how I have used AI within that process. I have used AI as an editorial tool, in much the same way I have used human editors and beta readers in the past. After my first draft, human readers offered

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suggestions—some I accepted, others I set aside. My interaction with AI has been no different. It has, at times, suggested expansions, reductions, or clarifications. Sometimes I followed that advice; sometimes I rejected it. The discernment, the final decision, and the responsibility for the text have always remained with me. This raises, for me, an interesting question. If I were to follow your editorial suggestions closely in a future draft, would that diminish my authorship? Of course not. We understand that literature has always been, to some degree, collaborative in its refinement. Editors, beta readers, and now AI tools all contribute in different ways, but the work remains the author’s. I want to be clear that I am not arguing this point in an effort to persuade you to reconsider your decision. I respect your position. This reflection is, in part, a way for me to articulate—to myself as much as to you—that this is my novel. While I am cautious about the phrase “AIassisted,” I could accept, perhaps, the idea of “AIedited,” provided it is understood in the same spirit as any editorial collabo ration. The human authorship—the imagination, the structure, the intent, and the final voice—remains mine. Email from the author to the publisher: March 28, 2026 Hi. I have been busy with tons of things so am finally getting back with a longer reply to your email as I promised. I have kept track of our email correspondence because I find it is such an interesting topic as we walk in the historic journey of the start of AI. See the attached documen but jump to the end to see my longer reply. I have colour coded our comments including what chat gpt has to say. I am thinking that I might post this growing document on my writers blog with my ms. Let’s see if anyone cares to read or comment. As you will see i have removed your name and any reference to you.

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The Junos are happening tomorrow. There are two music releases that were apparently 100% AI generated that have been disqualified and are not part of the running. ChatGPT just game me a rundown on the rules. Here is what it had to say: The official rules The Junos have made their position very clear: AI can be used — but not as the main creator Humans must be the primary creative force Fully AIgenerated music is NOT eligible “A work that contains no human authorship is not eligible” The debate that I was hearing on CBC was interesting. Everyone agreed that AI can make good music and is not distinguishable from human created music and is worth listening to but it should be disqualified from the Junos – I agree though one day there might be a Juno category for Canadian AI generated music. If my novel was judged by the music rules it would fully qualify because it is not generated by AI. LOL it might not win an award because of your literary observations but according to my Beta Readers it is worth reading. Let me close this email by saying again. I am happy to have had your Beta Reader import and when I have the time I will be doing another rewrite. Email from publisher: March 28, 2026 Tai , You seem to rely on ChatGPT like the family shrink, taking all your dil s to AI. It’s a pervasive and dehumanizing habit, reducing writers to prompt engineers. Let me respond in point form on my phone (pardon the typos) as I do not have any more time to dwell on this: Mine was not a “defensive rejection” but a “hopeful” one, hoping you would take my feedback and work on it.

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“2 pages in...” okay, let me be blunt and say it was “one page in” when I detected a heavy AI treatment of this work. I have read your other work and the contrast screamed to the heavens. Layers I meant character layering not more technical layering with Caelara and other systems. We need more humanity in your story, not more machines. I DO write multipage rejections when I want to save a writer from doom. I spent about 2 hours composing (without the help of any AI) your rejection letter, because I wanted to choose the right words and not piss you off. I am not your run of the mill CANLIT publisher who sends canned 2line rejections, often with the wrong name of the author. But ChatGPT ‘s assessment of my rejection letter HAS pissed me off! I do not write rough notes and get ChatGPT to finish off my sentences you may do that. I don’t. The only tool I have open is Grammarly on my laptop, which corrects my punctuation as I write. I don’t even have Grammarly to assist me as I write this note on my phone. As a writer , I write my own lines, no thanks ChatGPT! You are free to post these comments on your blog and use my name as the publisher/commenter. I stand behind what I write. But there won’t be any more comments from me on this subject as I think we have beaten it to death. My final point: turn off ChatGPT and write your book in your own hand and let your voice shine. All the best! Email from the author to the publisher: March 30, 2026 A Final Comment: A Rebuttal Banter of Sorts Yes Dear Publisher, I do use ChatGPT as an editing tool fairly often, LOL, but I don’t think I understand your comment “…like a family shrink”. I used ChatGPT to translate a long document from Spanish into English today. What a wonderful tool. Yesterday I had a business letter to an architect firm that ChatGPT edited for me. After I edited what ChatGPT gave me I sent the letter and believe me it was still in my voice. I wrote a formal report on a heating system to a committee

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and had ChatGPT edit for me. Depending on what I am writing, I use ChatGPT all the time to assist with spelling, punctuation and grammar. On a literary level I use ChatGPT to edit all the time but let me clarify this so you, and every reader, understand implicitly that I know my own literary voice. ChatGPT has actually learned some of my habits as a literary writer – it is a slow learner it has to be reminded regularly but it does learn, I have learned how to be a better prompter over time. Everything that is in my novel is written by me, a human. Even after I get ChatGPT to edit I ALWAYS edit what ChatGPT has returned to me – I often reject much of what ChatGPT has returned to me. In literary discussions i have said many times about my style as a writer that I am an editorwriter. There is very very little that I write that does not go through a long and laborious editing process, whether it is for my poetry, short stories, novels or even a rebuttal of sorts as this is. In some ways I envy a writer that taps out finished poems or prose or even a finished email. Early in this banter you commented about me being dyslexic. I don’t know what that has to do with anything. I don’t know if my seemingly long editingwriting process is a result of being dyslexic. When I was in university writing an essay style exam I was ALWAYS the last one finished as I crumpled up my scrapped pieces of scribbled paper and handed in my in my final essay with arrows and squiggled notes in the margin. LOL, I was delighted when I got a 79%. Would it have been cheating if I finished my essay and then let ChatGPT edit out my sometimes poor sentence structure that was a result of rushing to get my essay finished? Recently for a metaphysical book that I am working on I dusted off a university essay entitled, The DeAnthropomorphisation of God. Years ago I received a 75% on that essay. ChatGPT did a final edit for me this week. I edited what ChatGPT gave me back and now it is well worth a higher mark and will be published in a book on metaphysics. By the way it is still in my voice as a writer and was written by me not AI. Do I still have anything to learn about writing a novel – you betcha I do. LOL I just turned to ChatGPT to check if “betcha” is a proper word and spelled properly. LOL – it just said that, in context with my writing

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style and sentence structure it was correct. I don’t apologise for checking with ChatGPT. If it had said something like, in context with the paragraph and your literary voice you might use “you bet”, I would have rejected the advice. I’m sorry I’m on a roll here so let me comment about “Literary Voice”. I think that I am a skilled enough writer that I would use a different literary voice from novel to novel. One of my first novels “Living in the Shadow” was almost 100% character development driven. I might describe it as: psychologically introspective, nonlinear autobi ographical fiction. My novella “The Family Reunion” was written in a fun lighthearted poetic voice filled with dialogue and fun anecdotes. While I might agree with you that my novel, that you have rejected “MIGHT” need more humanity in the story, it is written in a totally, utterly different literary voice. My novel “Prisoners of Silence” is a speculative futurefiction novel that has a very different literary style. Despite it being edited by ChatGPT and then edited again by me, it is still written by me and in my literary voice. I wish you had rejected my novel strictly on the literary basis that you stated rather than basing your judgment on whether it was written by AI. LOL If you had rejected it on its literary merits this conversation would have been very short. I was thinking about your statement – Layers I meant character layering not more technical layering with Caelara and other systems. We need more humanity in your story, not more machines. I was thinking about your word “We”. It sounds like the royal “WE”. If you had said “I” need more humanity. You said: Your novel, in its present form, has many shortcomings: a. It is totally plotdriven with a high quotient of technical jargon. b. Characters (the human element of any novel) are cardboard cutouts. Some are just names with no human traits or vulnerabilities. I will repeat the idea that I respect your opinion as a writer but the feedback that I have received from a couple of Beta Readers is that the novel was engaging. So far no one has suggested that the characters are a cardboard cutout or

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that there is a lack of human element BUT my ego is not so big that I will not look at your criticism seriously. The reason that anyone gives a ms to a Beta Reader is to get feedback so thank you for your input. You said: You have a good premise: the loss of free thought by humansusurped by AIand the battle to restore it. You also have a good ending: ECHO is contained but could always resurface, so we must be evervigilant much like our battle to preserve democracy today. Thank you for that. Let’s see if one of two things might emerge: first, whether there is merit in your hypothesis that the novel could benefit from more humanity; and second, whether I have the skill to bring that humanity forward, “IF” it is actually indeed needed. This entire banter is filled with ironies, some of them linked directly to ChatGPT. One irony I am still quietly amused by is that you relied on an AI tool to determine whether my novel was written by AI. Apart from the level of trust placed in such an algorithmic tool, it turns out the conclusion was incorrect. My novel was not AIgenerated. The second irony is that I used an AI tool to assess whether your response had been written or edited by AI. It said yes, while you said no. I hope you, and any readers following this exchange, find at least a measure of humour in that. Not a single author today who uses a computer is entirely untouched by AI assistance. At one end of the spectrum are spellcheckers, punctuation tools, and grammar systems quietly underlining our work in red, green, and blue. At the far end are fully AIgenerated texts, produced without meaningful human intervention or revision. For the purposes of this discussion, the real question seems to be: how far along that spectrum should a writer choose to engage these tools, and how far along that same spectrum might a publisher reasonably expect to draw the line? So let me make one final observation that I have taken from this banter (LOL AI wanted me to use the word “exchange” but I kept the word “banter”. In this new AI era we are now living in, I am beginning

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to think that every work of fiction should include a statement on the information or copyright page outlining how AI was used in the writing process. For Prisoners of Silence, I find myself considering what such a statement might read like. Perhaps it should be something along these lines: 100% of the plot is a human creation by the human author; 100% of the characters and their development are a human creation by the human author; and 100% of the chapter structure, including the number and order of chapters, is the work of a human created by the human author. AI was used for spellchecking and punctuation though corrected by the human author for Canadian spelling and punctuation. AI was not used for grammar generation. AI and human editors were used for literary refinement, but all edits, whether AI‐assisted or human‐assisted, were reviewed, edited, approved or rejected by the human author. I may still need to refine that statement, and yes, I suppose I will end up asking AI to help me edit it. Email from the author to the publisher: April 05, 2026 A CanLit friend who read my novel said: Your novel does not read like it was written by AI but who am I to judge. Even though I have read tones of different styles of books over my years as a writer I am not sure I would recognise an AI generated style if it jumped out and dog eared my pages but as a seasoned reader I would recognise the difference between good and bad writing. To me it reads like a philosophical, idea‐driven, plot‐driven novel that prioritizes concept over character. Some like lots of character development and some like a philosophical plot that will make them think. Maybe you could push the character development a bit more but I was satisfied with the novel as it was. It was a quick easy read and I sometimes appreciate that. I guess no book can be

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everything for every reader. I don’t say this with any judgment or analysis but I don’t care if it was AI generated, AI assisted, or AI spell checked. All I care about is enjoying the read. Dear Publisher, I have had many family dining room conversation and chats over coffee with friends. This is partly what I am digesting from all of these conversations so let me stumble through. All of this talk about the role of AI in literature and my novel specifically has been quite rewarding and stimulating so pardon me for dragging this on. I totally understand if you do not want to be part of this dialogue as it is rather time consuming. LOL one last comment about how I have used AI – Sorry but yes I have been known to use an AI synonym checker as I write. Email from publisher: April 13, 2026 Hi Tai, I hope (and I) have quite recovered from our last AI exchange. I ran your m/s through a more benign AI tracker, GPT Zero (that is now a free embed into Google Docs in Chrome) and got a different reading: AI = 8% Mixed (AI/Human) 19% Human 73% I also tested this GPT Zero app, by taking a humanwritten document, written in present tense, and asking ChatGPT to convert it to past tense. So in effect. ChatGPT rewrote some of the sentences. But when I flushed this revised document through GPT Zero, it came out as “100% human written” as it recognized the original humanonly writing. So GPT Zero is the least restrictive of the AI Tracker tools I have come across and gives the writer a larger margin for error.

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So, I have to conclude that these AI Tracker tools are still unstable, although they are being used extensively by those who are concerned about publishing AIgenerated content. However, they do not count AI rewritten human sentences as being AIGenerated. You may have used some passages in your manuscript wholly extracted from ChatGPT without modification, and those are what caught the AI Trackers’ attention. However, I repeat, that even an 8% AIgenerated book (not counting the 19% mixed) will still be counted as written by AI by Amazon, Ingram, and CanLit, and would be subject to their respective ostracization actions. Hope this helps! Email from author: April 13, 2026 Thanks for your email about the evolution of AI detector software. This can of worms, despite how interesting the fishing bait is, has a few cockroaches in it. I don’t think we are totally finished with this banter even though it is well over 6k words at this point. Aside from the banter about whether the ms was AI generated or not I will once again express my appreciation for your feedback and feedback from beta readers about the literary merits of the ms. I did take your feedback to heart and did a rewrite that hopefully added enough humanity into the story. The ms is once again with a couple of new beta readers. I look forward to hear their comments. One is a PhD retired CanLit Professor/author and the other is simply a retired CanLit professor / author. As much as I thought the ms was finished when I sent it to you, I once again feel it is finished but my ego is not so big that would consider more feedback and improve the ms further even though I keep

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thinking it is ﬁnished. It is an interesting curve to the AI story that you came up with these statistics: AI = 8% Mixed (AI/Human) – 19% Human – 73% Interesting statistics but I am sticking with this statement that I have pasted at the top of my ms: Declaration of Human Authorship: This novel was written by the human author. 100% of the plot is a human creation by the human author; 100% of the characters and their development are a human creation by the human author; and 100% of the chapter structure, including the number and order of chapters, is human created by the human author. AI was used for spellchecking and punctuation though corrected by the human author for Canadian spelling and human punctuation decisions. AI was not used for grammar generation. AI and human editors were used for literary reﬁnement, improvement, and tweak, but all edits, whether AI‐assisted or human‐assisted, were reviewed, edited, approved or rejected by the human author. This novel was not AI generated. I sent an email pitch to Walrus early today asking if they were interested in this as an AI story. Their AI robot reply said that if I did not hear back from them within three weeks I should not expect a reply. I am considering sending a pitch to a couple of CBC producers. Email from author to CBC: The Current with Matt Galloway April 14, 2026 I just listened to the CBC (The Current with Matt Galloway) program about using AI to “generate” a novel. There is so much more that

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needs to be said. First of all I stand by my statement that will be included at the start of my novel (My Human Written Novel) This is my Declaration of Human Authorship statement. This novel was written by the human author. 100% of the plot is a human creation by the human author; 100% of the characters and their development are a human creation by the human author; and 100% of the chapter structure, including the number and order of chapters, is human created by the human author. AI was used for spellchecking and punctuation though corrected by the human author for Canadian spelling and human punctuation decisions. AI was not used for grammar generation. AI and human editors were used for literary refinement, improvement, and tweak, but all edits, whether AI‐ assisted or human‐assisted, were reviewed, edited, approved or rejected by the human author. This novel was not AI generated. My novel exists because of me as a human creator not because of AI. It takes genuine literary and intellectual skill to become an effective authorprompter, because the process is far more than simply asking AI a question. To craft a long, elaborate, thorough, creative, directive prompt requires my human clarity and vision. It takes precision of language, and an ability to anticipate structure, tone, and outcome before a single word is returned by AI. The human author prompter must think like a creative, intellectual being. This is something that AI can’t do. It can’t think like me a human author. I am a human writer and editor shaping intention, guiding nuance, and refining direction through the human prompt process. In this sense, prompting is not a shortcut but an extension of human authorship, where my human revision remains firmly in my skill as a human author. There is too much more to say so let me stop here.

Excerpt from an email from a fellow author April 16, 2026 The AI issue is going to get tougher with time. I suspect we are going to turn into custodians and reviewers of creativity. It feels like the

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death of genre writing, which is often more formulaic. The only battle I can see ﬁghting with AI in the distant future is the creation of ruthlessly original, revolutionary prose. AI is based on what exists in databases and the internet. Writers will have to write based on what does not exist in form, tone, content, or cannot be easily expressed in an AI prompt. That’s a faint hope. For now, I respect [the publisher that rejected your novel for] holding the fort against the tide of AI generated writing. However, I have no knowledge of how an AI catcher works.

Shane requested that I add this statement here at the end of this long string. " In case you didn't guess it, the Publisher is Shane Joseph of Blue Denim Press."

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Book reviews of: Lilacs at Sunset – In Defense of Creative Writing with AI By Richard M. Grove QuodSermo Publishing (2026) ISBN: 9781998324354

For the FREE PDF book go to: https://issuu.com/richardgrove1 2nd Edition coming soon! Issue 024 Devour: Art and Lit Canada

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Review by Kathryn Oswald In writing his book, Lilacs at Sunset: In Defense of Creative Writing with AI, Richard M. Grove made an incredibly important point, “The human author needed to edit, edit, and edit again until the AI generated story became their own.” My first thought when I hear ‘AI’ is generally negative. I think the main reason for this is that I often have the ‘AI debate’ with friends and family members, several of whom are college science professors, and students underhandedly using Artificial Intelligence for assignments has been a growing concern for many of them over the past several years. So, in my mind AI is inseparably linked to a form of cheating. My initial perspective came from the notion that you just throw the ‘idea’ in ChatGPT and you’re done. This is extremely untrue however and as Grove notes numerous times “What AI produces is ALWAYS only the beginning.” Even as I say that I have generally felt averse to AI, I realize that I have relied on it without truly recognizing it my entire writing career. Whether through spell check, a quickly googled question producing a summarized answer immediately, or through the numerous extremely useful thesaurus word generator sites that I constantly find myself deferring to, my writing is thoroughly integrated with AI assistance. However, until recently I have not given serious thought to using generative AI in my writing. As Prof. Miguel Ángel Olivé Iglesias wrote in his review, “AI has been used and abused ever since it appeared.” This is incredibly true; AI is a tool and like any tool there are both right and wrong ways to use it. Most of my negative feelings about AI stem from this incorrect usage. That said, Grove has compiled an impressive commentary on using AI correctly, as a supportive assistant rather than a brainpower replacement. As with any innovation there will be contention, and change will eventually find its way into the lives of all involved. The important thing is to not let AI replace our human creativity. I think one of the

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biggest worries around AI is that it will surpass us in being human and our humanity will then be diminished. This, however, is missing an important aspect. As humans, our lives are all based around an everpresent search for meaning. This is one of the most founda tional aspects of humanity, and it is something that AI does not do. Grove alludes to this several times in his book particularly in the form of creativity, another integrally human skill. As he says, “If creativity simply means producing something new, then AI already demonstrates a form of creativity.” However, “The most powerful literature does not arise from novelty alone. It arises from experience transformed into meaning. A writer is not merely arranging words on a page. A writer is attempting to express something that has been lived, felt, struggled with, and understood.” The form of writing in which these fundamentals of humanity are most plainly exhibited is poetry. I would go so far as to say that this is a reason AI is a bad poet. The emotions and experiences that poetry was made to express are not something AI itself has ever or will ever actually experience. It cannot articulate memories, grief, joy, or love in the raw way that poetry requires and so, it is a bad poet. I read a lot, and in reading many of the AI responses to Grove’s prompts I found myself thinking, “I’ve definitely read worse things.” There is a catch you see. There is a difference between good writing and the appearance of good writing. I think we often settle for novelty rather than substance. Grove’s book gives us several illumi nating facts to battle this risk with. The most important of these is far subtler than you would think. ‘Small philosophical instructions tell the AI what invisible current should flow beneath the surface events. Without that invisible current, stories often feel technically competent but emotionally hollow.’ As human writers, it is almost impossible not to include at least a small bit of that ‘invisible current.’ Our views and world perspectives somehow always bleed through the pages, even when we try to conceal them. They are part of us as individuals, and AI does not have that. Without a specified prompt AI will write ‘hollow stories’ that lack the implied meaning that pervades every human thought.

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Our job as writers is to learn to adapt and use the tools as tools. Lilacs at Sunset expands our toolbox and gives us easily accessible techniques to apply to our own writing. AI is an incredible implement that is right at our ﬁngertips as modernday writers. How will we use it? Kathryn Oswald Author, Poet, Reviewer, Publishing Project Manager

Multitudes A review of Lilacs at Sunset: In Defense of Creative Writing and Editing with AI Review by Brian Way Any encounter with lilacs, real or imagined, always brings to my mind that powerful elegy, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” There, in an intense, unyielding and original poetic (really, a threnody), Walt Whitman envisions a supreme trinity linking the annual reap pearance of lilacs, that “blooming perennial,” to the death of Abraham Lincoln, the “drooping star in the west,” and, ultimately, with the poet’s own “thought of him I love.” Lincoln is the “great star disap pear’d” and, as “[e]verreturning spring” arrives, signaled by the ap pearance of lilacs in his dooryard, the poet is reminded of the President’s assassination (Good Friday, April 14, 1865) and a loss that “will not free my soul.” In his work, Whitman mourned the death of Lincoln without consolation in a series of poems, and as in “When Lilacs Last Bloomed,” the best he can do is “cover you over with roses and early lilacs”; at the end of the poem the speaker remains desolate in his sorrow, lost “in the cedars dusk and dim.” (Another poem in Whitman’s Lincoln series, the resolutely melancholy “O Captain! My Captain!”, was popularized by its reference in the ﬁlm Dead Poets So‐ ciety.) And for Whitman, as the lilacs resonate in his thought, so it is with all creative expression: it is centred in his soul, in his self. His in

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spiration, his compulsion, is “to sing the body electric,” the song of the self. Like Wordsworth’s The Recluse, Whitman envisioned all his works fitting under one umbrella, all were “Leaves of Grass” and that final collection is enormous in so many ways. As he proclaims, “I contradict myself / I am large, I contain multitudes.” The point of inspiration, of poetry, was always in his thought and soul—he contained everything, and everyone. As he proclaims in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, perusing on all the people of the world, before and after, who have crossed the East River on that boat, “we plant you permanently within us.” Un derstanding the source of his inspiration is critical to the existence of the poetry, and the poet, too. And Whitman, although extreme, was not alone as a writer with that concern—time after time, writers seek the source of the ‘visionary dream”, where does creative inspiration originate? What is the origin of the drive to create art, of artistic stim ulus? Sidney describes poets as semidivine and poetry as the truly original sacred art, and Shelley likens poetry to a smoldering coal, nowhere near the blazing fire of its inspiration but the best a human can do (the story of Prometheus resonates through Shelley’s work, that Titan who stole fire from the gods giving humans knowledge and the potential for divine insight and for which he was punished by Zeus, forever chained to a rock in the presence of a liverhungry eagle.) Of course, stealing fire from the gods is what a poet does. In his Bi‐ ographia, Coleridge envisions a Primary and a Secondary Imagination, the first being the agent of one’s perception of the everyday and the second an echo of the first, “dissolving, diffusing and dissipating” that experience in order to recreate that which one sees—such is the origin of poetic inspiration. Such allows “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (Biographia Literaria 159). Wordsworth speaks of those remarkable spots in time which can, in reflection, become poetic monuments, Gide and James speak of gemination, Joyce of epiphanies and Eliot, incarnations. Virginia Woolfe looked to “the dark places of psychology,” the oceanic id. In the end, for all these writers, critically, a need to understand is focused on the source of inspiration—how, why, where comes the urge to write, to express, to put down some idea or response or feeling on

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paper (or some other medium), where before there was none. To cap ture some vision which, otherwise, would be lost. Independently, in Whitman’s vernacular, to sing the song of the self and know why. Lilacs at Sunset by Richard Grove (QuodSermo Publishing 2026) sings out as an attempt to examine Artificial Intelligence (AI) in partic ular as it may be an aid in developing and enhancing creative writing, as it may act a source for inspiration. The ultimate intention of the book is stated in its first few paragraphs: “The central argument of this book is that AI can assist the writing process, but it cannot replace the human experiences that give writing its emotional depth, meaning, and significance” (6). Grove emphatically insists that human experi ence, its joys, sorrows, responses, memories, associations, will always be the principal force that drives the will to create. But, inevitably, given the technological developments of this age and beyond, AI will continue to carve out its place as an able, helpful assistant. The future of writing according to Grove lies in a “continuing collaboration be tween human imagination and technological possibility” (6). But “human experience” Grove insists, “lies at the heart of meaningful lit erature” (9). This is an unusual way for any critical book to begin, in essence stating its recommendations, its conclusions and findings, before it sorts through its raw materials, its evidence, its research and data. In this sense, this is a backward book—it begins with its conclusions. But it works! It clearly gets its message across. Following this early sum mation, most of the remainder of Lilacs at Sunrise is a presentation of rough data, a series of exemplars illustrating how an AI program might respond to certain creative writing prompts. In all, five exemplars are presented—topics include a folk tale about a flying pig, sisters who try to save one another from drowning, a skydiving story, an urban mur der mystery, and the challenge to develop a story from the details of a brief email. In each, the AI program is given three prompts, each asking for a bit more detail in the story to be written and then, after three AI ‘cracks’ at the tale, the “editor” writes a version of the fiction. The book then shifts to a short section on poetry concluding with the advice, “never use AI to write a poem.” An example of an “AI poem” in response to the cover photograph is provided—mostly it is a defin

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itively unpoetic collection of descriptive sentences. Given the same visual prompt, several examples of poems by actual poets follow to conclude Lilacs at Sunset. As Grove suggests, his collection of AI stories is as interesting for what they do not show as for what they do. In postmodern times, in general, a great deal of artistic energy and critical scholarship has been directed toward the intricate dimensions of narratology, the creative discourse applied to the telling of a story by a writer, the varied shades of persona and mood and voice and points of view, internal, external and zero focalization, all naturally adding to the depth, meaning and pleasure of a fiction. Everything from Hemingway’s minimalistic “ice berg theory” of writing, influenced by his years as a journalist, to Joyce’s intricate streams of consciousness burrowing into psycholog ical and linguistic complexities. In effect, material written by AI deals with none of this. As Grove contends, no matter how multifaceted the prompts, AI “could not independently produce the stories, essays, poems, or novels that emerge from my particular experiences and imagination” (10). Nor, I might add, does AI have the artistic ingenuity to explore and enhance narrative complexities. At best, its attempts seem flat, lifeless. In public perception, Artificial Intelligence is a river that flows both ways. It is embraced and used for its tremendous benefits and feared for its potential evil. It can automate repetitive tasks, speedup scien tific research, improve data analysis and processing, be available roundtheclock, reduce errors and costs, and enhance cyber security. Alternatively, AI is also viewed, potentially, as being responsible for present and future job losses, for the unintentional propagation of bi ases such as racism or sexism, for social manipulation such as predic tive policing or facial recognition, Flock cameras, deepfakes, and, in the extreme, rogue AI and nuclear annihilation. In writing, great is the temptation among students to use AI to write their assignments for them. This is an issue of ethics. AI is a computer; it has no moral com pass. When a student is required to submit her/his own work but uses AI, this is cheating, plagiarism. And plagiarism, as such, probably re mains as the one capitulary offence for which institutes of Higher Learning will expel its students.

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In Lilacs at Sunset, the central proposition is that the use of AI as a tool to aid the creative process is acceptable, perhaps even desir able—given its availability, a ‘nobrainer.’ Grove comments: “As you will discover while reading this book, and the followup volume that is already in progress, I have no problem with using AI as a writing tool (9).” And through example and illustration, Grove’s argument is in formed and logical. But there is a fine line here between use as a tool and substitution as an opioid, a narrow hallucinatory tightrope to be walked. The issue revolves on just how, and how much, AI is used, and that is a factor difficult to judge. Certainly, in this age of word proces sors, I would guess that most writers use spellandgrammar checking tools, thesauri, search engines like Google and so on without a second thought; and Copilot and ChatGPT and the Cloud are never far away. But if I were to take the draftversion of a Charles Dickens’ story (and there are plenty) and modify it and publish it as my own, that would still not make the story mine. So if a person jots down half a dozen words, has AI write a draft of a story, and then the person proceeds to revise and enhance that tale and present it is her/his own, is that not simply a form of technoplagiarism? Of cheating. Maybe; maybe not! It can be, I think. And perhaps the greatest question, what writer would want to do that anyway? Students struggling to keep up with deadlines, maybe, but not a writer where the essence of writing, the thrill, lies as much in beholding, experiencing, the very divinity of cre ation as it does in the finished product. Yes, AI has a world of knowl edge, a trunkful of images and metaphor, a dumpsterfull of caricature and characterization. In Whitman’s vernacular, AI contains multitudes; but of course, as he claims, so do we as humans, as novelists and poets and journalists and all the rest. The true test of the artist, in fact, may really, simply be to seek and find, for that briefest of moments, the spark of the divine within and without. To find that godly fire Shelley talked about. Only there does the essence of a lilac at sunset truly re side, only there does revelation await. Brian T. W. Way PhD retired Professor, Author and Reviewer

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Lilacs at Sunset Review by Shane Joseph Richard M. Grove’s Lilacs at Sunset arrives at a moment when the question of AI and authorship has moved past theory and into every working writer’s daily practice, and the book’s central claim is disarmingly modest: artificial intelligence can be a genuine creative tool, but it cannot supply the lived experience that gives writing its weight. Grove, a longtime poet, editor, and publisher, builds his case less through argument than through demonstration, and it is in that demonstration that the book finds its real value. The opening essay sets the terms gracefully. Grove’s extended metaphor, in which lilacs represent the human capacity to notice beauty and the sunset stands for mortality and reflection, does real work: it reminds us that description is not the same as meaning, and that a machine can render the colour of a blossom without ever having lost someone in a garden like it. From there, the book’s strongest material follows: four extended case studies in which Grove takes a story from an initial oneline AI prompt through successive drafts, expanded prompts, and finally heavy human revision, printing each stage in full. Readers watch a whimsical tale about a witch, a frog, and a flying pig grow, prompt by prompt, into something with genuine tonal control and emotional stakes, and watch a lean AI paragraph about a foreign country’s blackouts evolve, through the author’s editing, into a piece of speculative epistolary fiction. This is the book’s real achievement: it does not simply assert that human editing matters, it lets the reader see the difference on the page, draft against draft. The accompanying tenpoint editing checklist and the list of “philosophical prompt additions” are the most immediately useful sections for working writers, offering concrete, teachable techniques for pushing generic AI prose toward something with tonal irregu larity, restraint, and authorial fingerprint. The poetry section, though brief, contains one of the book’s sharper and more original claims,

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that AI is fundamentally a poor poet, though this idea is asserted rather than explored, and a reader hungry for the reasoning behind it will come away wanting more. That hunger points to the book’s central limitation. Lilacs at Sunset is a demonstration in search of an argument. Grove is clearly aware that AI has been, in his words, “used and abused,” yet the manuscript never puts a genuine opposing case on the page, whether about the erosion of a writer’s own skill, the unresolved questions of trainingdata consent, or the ethics of disclosure to agents and readers who assume a manuscript is wholly human made. Nor does the book engage with the wider public conversation already underway around AI and authorship; it argues almost entirely from its own examples, with little reference to the debates, disputes, or institutional policies that make this such a live question. The effect is a book that will comfort readers already inclined to agree and will not do the harder work of persuading those who aren’t. Still, as a craft manual disguised as a manifesto, the book succeeds. Writers curious about AIassisted drafting will find real, usable technique here, and the promised second edition, with its expanded text, has room to become the more rigorous defence its title announces. For now, Lilacs at Sunset is best read not as the final word on its subject but as a working notebook from a writer thinking, in public, about where the human hand still belongs. Review by Shane Joseph Author, Reviewer, Publisher of Blue Denim Press

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Review of, Lilacs at Sunset: In Defense of Creative Writing and Editing with AI Review by Antony Di Nardo “Let me give you an important tip, never use AI to write a poem. AI is simply a bad poet.” You’ll find those words in Richard (Tai) Grove’s Lilacs at Sunset: In Defense of Creative Writing and Editing with AI, an ebook intended to promote Artificial Intelligence in the role of writer’s assistant. As a poet who has no use for Artificial Intelligence in his creative work, I was both relieved and delighted when I read that “tip.” I couldn’t agree more. That said, for those of you who prefer prose to the broken line and are interested in taking advantage of AI as a writing tool, all the other sections of this book delve, with oodles of examples and suggestions, into the very mechanics needed to optimize the generative aspects of AI. As a languageuser, I can’t deny that AI has made its way into my writing. I now can spell just about any word I can think of. My Word program selfcorrects. I don’t suspect my grammar anymore. Thanks to the more pedestrian and “invisible” functions of AI, I can better focus my energy into churning out ideas and images into broken lines that ping. Diction that sings. I play with syntax and semantics, without the help of AI. Yet, I can search the thesaurus under Tools on my laptop for a plethora of synonyms and alternatives. O the trials we don’t put language through asking this and that of it expecting always more another word for moon another word for you an alternate for something else a meme to catapult our voice into the memosphere words come to mind we hang them on a line

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stretch them on a screen pin them on a passing cloud we process language in algorithms of plus or minus, of serious or not we process meaning to make more, metaphors to saw the wind in half words come in packets, in fullyformed clichés words echo words that echo other words that echo words as a languageuser I write (therefore) you read * As a languageuser, I have a practical, working relationship with Artificial Intelligence. Whether talking to an app, writing on a laptop, composing on my phone, creating any kind of text in any form that involves a screen, then I no doubt make some passive use of AI. In fact, for the poem you just read, I asked Siri to give me a standard dictionary definition of the words, “meme” and “memosphere,” to ascertain that I was using them correctly. The program also corrected my spelling of “algorithm.” Other than that, AI had no role whatsoever to play in the making of that poem. As a poet, I rely strictly on imagination to work experience into language and see how that plays out. Work and play. Both essential, if not synonymous, when it comes to writing poetry – and that’s something AI can’t replace or duplicate. Tai makes that clear: [This book] reflects my belief that AI should be viewed as a creative tool rather than a creative replacement. Just as a camera did not eliminate painting and the word processor did not eliminate authorship, AI does not eliminate the essentiality of the human writer. The writer remains the source of intention, judgment, meaning, and lived experience. There is no shortage of examples in this howto manual for developing a story and capitalizing on AI in the process through the

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use of sophisticated prompts. Tai lays out lists of potential edits and accompanying ideas to help “humanize” an assisted narrative and expand on it. The book also comes complete with four short stories that materialize and evolve, right before your very eyes, thanks to Tai’s creative use of carefullyworded prompts and edits. Prompts, as we are reminded, are the heart and soul of any AIassistant. Writers write because they must. Somewhere in their being there’s a narrative itch that must be scratched, a story to be told. Writer and teacher, Lorrie Moore, says “Make [storytelling] interesting and it will be true: this is what story writers live by. In the way of Flaubert, storytelling is investigative and conjectural: we tell stories to find out what we believe. In the way of Joan Didion, we tell them “in order to live.” In the way of Scheherazade, we tell them in order not to die.” Tai’s intent and purpose with this book is just that: how to make your story interesting. And make it come alive. An entire section is devoted to poetry and there we find a sample poem written by ChatGPT based on the cover photo and the book’s title, Lilacs at Sunset. That poem is followed by several others whose authors were asked by Tai to respond to that photo, similar to the way he prompts his AI app. When you compare the results, AI vs human authorship, it becomes blatantly obvious that not only does AI suck at poetry, but the human imagination is by far more vast and exciting. This, for me, is proof that poetry can only ever be, uniquely in and of itself, a human thing. To conclude, I’d like to say that Tai, as writer, publisher and Poet Laureate, with dozens of titles to his name, has been a longtime advocate and champion of writing and writers. Given the current vitriol against AI and mistrust of its unguarded role in authorship, his support of AI as a creative writing tool, is, to say the least, contro versial. There’s no doubt that he’s opened up a proverbial can of worms and there are many writers at this moment wriggling in their seats. It is to his credit, however, that he has not shied away from his position on the matter and I won’t be surprised if he finds converts to his side eager to experience AIassisted writing. Antony Di Nardo Poet, Retired Teacher

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The Victor Family Monarchy an International AI Assisted Writing Project The Victor Family Monarchy project is exploring what a novel can become. Born from six handpainted plates by Cuban artist Victor Manuel Velázquez Mirabal, this ambitious international project brings together human creativity and artiﬁcial intelligence, incorpo rating AIassisted visual art, video, music and narration, along with the work of multiple human authors, into a single literary saga serial. Project creator Richard M. Grove used AI as a creative tool, not to replace human imagination, but to spark and expand it. Each character was developed through an intensive process of prompting, editing and reimagining until the characters began to feel fully alive. The Victor family saga was then developed into a Character Bible and Story Plotline, with AI used as a brainstorming and creative thinking tool throughout the process.

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From this foundation, the first chapter emerged, written by Richard. The second chapter was written by Emily Grove, an author, AI expert and digital marketing professional. Emily recently stepped back from her larger role in the project, while remaining one of its authors, after accepting a fulltime position in the marketing field as an SEO specialist. Together, Richard and Emily developed a unique process in which each new invited author receives the Character Bible, Story Bible and all previously written chapters. Each author then uses their own creative process, including AI prompting and editing where desired, to write a chapter that reflects their individual voice and imagination. A Project Editor will help ensure consistency, continuity and quality before the evolving manuscript is passed along to the next author. Central to the project is the principle that originality must remain human and that AI is simply a creative tool—a kind of intellectual sparring partner that can help authors explore possibilities and push creative boundaries, but never replace them. Each prospective author is encouraged to read the free PDF book Lilacs at Sunset for a fuller understanding of prompting and the importance of maintaining human authorship and creative control. Beyond the main narrative of the literary saga serial, the project is also exploring “side chapters” and microprose pieces that will expand beyond the traditional linear literary narrative. More information about these experimental elements will be announced as the project develops. For authors, artists, musicians and video creators, The Victor Family Monarchy offers an unusual opportunity to experiment with a new and evolving creative process. For readers and critics, it presents a bold exploration of literature’s future—a place where artistic tradition and emerging technology can meet while human imagination remains firmly at the centre of the storytelling. We have a Project Editor, Tony Di Nardo. He will receive and edit all submissions and over see continuity between chapters. If you are interested in writing a chapter for this project you can contact Tai at: WetInkBooks@gmail.com

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These are the original human painted plates by, Victor Manuel Velázquez Mirabal

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The Victor Family Monarchy Literary Saga Serial An international AI / Human literary multimedia project. Welcome to the Victor Family Monarchy, an AI / Human literary digital serial project. This project is not just another collaborative print book. While this project will start by being presented to the public in printed book form it will also be published in a multi-medium digital form. It is a bold experiment at the frontier of bridging literature, music, art, video and artificial intelligence. What makes this project so exciting is how it links traditional and innovative creative processes. This project will carry both the author and the reader through a personal revolution of creativity, using AI as a legitimate, expansive tool to develop the voices of multiple human authors, shaping the story into something that no conventional paper bound book can possibly do. Years ago, well before AI became a marketable tool, I acquired six hand-painted plates from my dear Cuban artist friend, Victor Manuel Velázquez Mirabal. These plates carried more than just well painted portraits, they held the DNA of full blown characters waiting to be born. I brought them into the digital realm as JPGs and introduced them to ChatGPT. Through a long process of prompting and experimentation, each face, from each of the plates became a full-bodied portrait, a person who could walk, talk, breathe, and live in a story. The process took hours of trial and error, prompting and re-prompting for each character, but in the end, I was delightfully happy with the AI generated results. AI truly was used as a creative tool. The characters started off as human made images on plates. With human creativity they were transformed into living, breathing characters. Don’t be frightened by AI as a tool. It literally is “only” a tool not a creator. As you can imagine, portraits alone are not enough to write a book. I used AI as a tool to brainstorm each character’s personality and biographical profile. This was not a simple push-button process. Every image required hours of careful prompting, writing, rewriting, editing, and reimagining until I felt each character was fully alive with their own unique personality.

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The same back-and-forth process unfolded when I began sketching the plot and the family’s interactive profile. It is essential to stress that AI did not write the character sketches, the plot or the story outline. I used AI as a thinking tool, something like a sparring partner or sounding board, never as a replacement for human imagination and human creativity. The originality of the characters, plot, and story design remains rooted in human creativity, in skillful prompting, and in the author’s creative judgment. Prompting, after all, is not a mechanical trick, it is a human creative skill based talent. It is a craft, shaped by a developed literary instinct, experience, and creative intuition. It is all built on the human author’s imagination. From this AI assisted foundation, the first chapter was born. When I felt it was ready, I invited my niece Emily to join me as project manager, editor, and fellow author. As an AI expert, she immediately understood the creative challenge and promise of this project. With AI’s help, she designed her own prompt, then wrote and edited the second chapter. This process demonstrated that each writer can take the same characters outlined in the character and plot bible and use AI as a springboard for their own voice, vision, and creativity.

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That is the heartbeat and soul of this project. Each author that is invited into The Victor Family Monarchy project will create their own chapter in collaboration with AI to whatever level they like. Authors will use AI to whatever level they are inspired to use it. It is important to remember that AI collaboration is never the end, it is simply the beginning. Each AI generated draft will be carefully edited, expanded, and enriched by the human author before being reviewed, edited and incorporated by the human project editor. All of this work will be done in preparation for the next author. This process ensures coherence and consistency of character voice while allowing every chapter to shine with the personality of its writer. The project is designed with human flexibility and human imagination in mind. Beyond the main goal of writing a novel, we are exploring the possibility of “side chapters,” which will consist of side stories that may not fit neatly into a conventional literary chronology. These side chapters will deepen the story and may develop into future books, enriching the tapestry of the Victor family monarchy saga.

Multi Media Short Saga Serial Format: Because of the rapid expansion of AI into art, video and music formats, we will add multimedia components to the digitally published format that will enrich the storytelling. As the project develops there will be AI assisted art, videos and music components added to the eBook platform. Each book will still be publishes as a printed book format for those that like to turn physical pages but the eBook format will have multi-media components. Stay tuned for a press release about this expanded call for submissions.

Storyline Lengths and Extended Format: Our original idea was to publish a 15 or 20 chapter book but rather than publish one long start, middle and end book, we will publish The Victor Family Monarchy project as a literary saga serial with 8 or 10 shorter interlinked books each with 4 to 6 chapters. Each book in the serial will be linked to a longer arching theme that takes the shorter books to flesh out and finish. Each short saga serial would cause the reader to want to

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read / listen to / watch the next book in the series. Each saga serial will have a title and will be published on its own as its own finished book. Why This Project Matters to Writers and Readers: For authors, this is an opportunity to break new ground and write in a direction they might never have imagined. This project offers a chance to experiment with a process that combines AI assisted art, music, video, narration and human originality, without giving up human control, human creativity, and human innovation. Through this process, writers will learn to wield AI as a powerful creative tool, not a crutch for lazy writing and creativity. For readers, The Victor Family Monarchy will be more than an exciting fictional read. In the eBook platform the reader will be able to view videos, play music, view art galleries, and listen as an audio book. This project is about the future of literature itself. This project will demonstrate that AI is not a threat to the human creative process, but it is a catalyst for collaboration and imagination. It will show how human storytellers can push the boundaries of what a novel can be.

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The Unexpected CoPilot How artiﬁcial intelligence helped me discover new creative possibilities through ﬂight simulation by Paul Brown

Around the time COVID hit, Microsoft announced the newest version of Flight Simulator, MSFS 2020. The timing was perfect. I had just retired from teaching high school, we were in lockdown, and the simulator gave me something to do during those hours at home. An unexpected bonus was meeting some really interesting people who shared my enthusiasm for exploring the world together, even if we were doing it virtually. One of the people I met ran a group flight every Saturday morning. But over time, he began running out of interesting places to fly, and the time it took to put a flight plan together was proving too onerous for him. Although I tried to come up with some ideas myself, scouring the entire planet for a collection of visually spectacular destinations was a daunting task. Then, this summer, along came ChatGPT.

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My first thought was to use it to come up with a route we could fly in about three hours using a Cessna 172, a small, singleengine airplane that cruises at about 100 knots, or 185 km/h. The results were astonishing. It not only came up with a route that had some beautiful landmarks, but it was able to provide pictures of the landmarks and some helpful documents that our fellow Twitch streamers could use to get more indepth information about where we were flying. When I asked it to turn the description of the route into a file that we could load into the plane in the simulator, it said it couldn’t, but it could give me all the code I needed so I could just copy and paste it into a file. It worked reasonably well, but there were a couple of things that needed altering, which it happily did. But the amazing thing was that when we developed a second flight, it even gave me the file already completed, and it worked perfectly on the first try. One thing I discovered fairly quickly was that AI wasn’t always right. A landmark that looked fascinating in photographs could be completely unremarkable from the cockpit of a simulated Cessna. So

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I began flying scouting missions, evaluating the suggested routes, and reporting back on what worked and what didn’t. ChatGPT would then help revise the flight plans and develop the stories around the places we decided to visit. It became a genuine backandforth creative process, with the AI supplying research and suggestions, and me providing the judgment that could only come from actually flying the route. But that was just the beginning. ChatGPT suggested that we could make an ongoing series of these trips. I thought, “Could we create a brand to go along with them?” It quickly came up with a few suggestions, and I picked Scenic Earth Project as one that really struck a chord for me. The next thing I asked was, “Can you create a logo to go with that brand?” It immediately came up with something that was perfect! By then, our creative locomotive was gathering speed, and there was no stopping it. One of the other fellows I flew with had done a tour where he had researched some interesting facts about our route, and he had prerecorded his commentary. He has an amazing radio voice, but

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mine definitely isn’t up to that level, and I didn’t like how “canned” his narration sounded. So I asked ChatGPT if we could develop a script to go with the flight. It happily complied, but when I asked it to give the script a voice, the results were dreadful. ChatGPT readily acknowledged its limitations and suggested several other AI tools that might do the job. One of them turned out to be exactly what I needed. I then asked it for a headshot of who it thought would make a good tour guide, both as a semicartoon character similar to the headshots we all had who worked with the Twitch streamer, and as a more realistic version. It came up with both, and the results were breathtaking. What began as a simple tour guide gradually became something much more interesting. We named her Emma, and as we developed

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more flights, she acquired a personality of her own. She became knowledgeable, funny, occasionally mischievous, and increasingly comfortable teasing me during her commentary. The people joining our flights began looking forward to hearing from her, and before long they were making jokes about whether Emma and I were romantically involved. Here was a fictional character, created with the help of AI, becoming a recognizable personality in a small online community. I certainly hadn’t anticipated that when I first asked ChatGPT to write a tour script. At that point, I decided I needed a paint scheme—or livery—for the plane I would be flying while guiding these trips. I had no idea how to create that, and I asked the Twitch streamer if he knew anyone who could do it. He had a suggestion, but I began to think that maybe I could do it myself. The first iteration took three weeks and probably about 30 hours, with ChatGPT acting as a very patient coach, researching tools, helping me figure out the very challenging process, and providing suggested colour schemes, fonts, and design elements. In the end, I had a gorgeouslooking livery. At one point, I spent what seemed like an eternity trying to get the artwork to line up across a tiny hinge on the aircraft’s tail. ChatGPT patiently suggested one adjustment after another, while I grew increasingly determined not to let a few pixels defeat me. Eventually, we got it right. It was a wonderfully ridiculous example of

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how much effort can go into something almost nobody else will ever notice. Full disclosure: I originally intended to have ChatGPT write much of this article for me. But by the time I’d explained everything that had happened, I realized I’d already written most of it myself. So I finished it on my own, then asked ChatGPT to proofread it and suggest improvements. And perhaps that’s the most important thing I’ve learned from this entire experience. AI hasn’t replaced my creativity. If anything, it has encouraged me to be more creative, to try things I wouldn’t previously have attempted, and to discover skills I didn’t know I had. I started out wanting help finding interesting places to fly. I ended up discovering a whole new way to explore my own imagination.

Paul Brown spent 22 years at IBM before becoming a high school computer science teacher. Photography and ﬂying have always been signiﬁcant passions.

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