Before even considering specific project ideas, the big question for me is whether to pursue primarily a creative project, or a traditional paper. Probably the way to make this decision would be to consider how each option aligns with my career goals — which, unhelpfully, are also in flux. So at this point, I think the wisest course would be to choose the project that’s most conceptually exciting to me, and figure out the career element later. This path definitely points me in the direction of a creative project.

As a novelist and short story writer, my first inclination would be to turn to fiction. I’m interested in exploring themes and questions such as:

• How physical presence and physical artifacts play a role in an AI- or tech-mediated storytelling context
• How we as humans can understand and (re)claim agency in our futures, given that algorithms (and the companies that control them) can not only predict but also materially influence our behavior
• How does an author’s engagement with their audience change if they use AI — or if their audience uses AI to interpret the work? Who are we writing for — humans, or the algorithms that feed humans?
• The forms that an AI-created story may take (if it can even be called a story; is it simply events linked together by chronology, as compared to human stories, which tend to have more of an aspect of causality?) (But how does this account for experimental fiction that may undermine expectations of causality?)
• Storytelling cycles — e.g., the ways that stories are passed down and evolve between generations; retellings; fanfiction, and other forms that continue a cycle of engagement with and evolution of an “original” story. 
  • In a way, machine learning works in similar cycles of constant iteration and refinement. Does this mean that machines can create their own storytelling traditions? Or is that still impossible, because they’re not creating with intention and intelligence?
• What does writing (as an inherently personal act, and even more personal when considering forms like memoir) look like when AI — with its depersonalizing and decontextualizing effects — becomes ubiquitous? 

My exploration of some of these themes through fiction might take many forms…

• Short story collection looking at a theme through various lenses
  • Stories of past, present, future; stories to the machine, by the machine, with the machine, against the machine, before the machine… 
  • Or more of a traditional collection where each story offers a different specific/concrete scenario to explore the theme from different angles
• Multiple versions of the same base narrative, told by human/machine/combination
• Interactive fiction that crosses the boundary between the digital and concrete worlds
  • Online story that asks readers to engage with their physical surroundings as part of the reading experience
  • Physical interactive story (like a choose your own adventure book) that has a corresponding digital element — e.g., a program or app that readers use that determines some facets of the story
  • A “scavenger hunt” piece of fiction — would this end up looking almost like a video game? Or would it be a hunt around different sites, or different pages on a site? This could be an opportunity to play with flexible narrative sequences, or how a story may still work (just in a different way) if pieces of it are missed. 
• Consecutive retellings of a very short story — the narrative is told through the story itself, but also through the changes from one iteration to another. Telling the story of a story, but also of the people/communities that tell it, the technologies that mediate it, the changing sociopolitical contexts surrounding it
  • Mirroring some sort of computational process that transforms text data? Could look at how human and machine processes — while often presented as conflicting/opposing — may not always be as different as we think
  • Could also explore these iterative retellings as a “historical artifact,” adding footnotes or marginalia from a fictional researcher reflecting on them in hindsight. This might be a way of exploring ideas of preservation, restoration, and also re/decontextualization of stories.
• Retelling of existing story, in a way that explores some of the themes above.
  • One example that comes to mind immediately: Macbeth, but the witches are AIs. What does it mean if AIs (not general AIs, but AIs as we have them now) are characters with agency in a story? Other characters respond to them, maybe form relationships with them, and in the case of the Macbeth example, make life-altering decisions based on them…
  • Retelling of an old story that’s about agency, individuality, truth, community/isolation, etc.; how does this story change in light of AI? Could I take the approach of actually using AI or data tools to contribute to this story, further complicating it?
• Stories within stories (within stories within stories…), multiple timelines and points of view, uniquely formatted work (e.g., incorporating nontraditional narrative forms), or other multivocal/multimodal approaches 
  • Example: A story involving AI, iteratively told, where the diegetic AI itself affects the trajectory of each subsequent iteration (though this might not be revealed until later). This may help illuminate the fact that nothing about technology is inevitable, even if tech companies would like us to believe it is.

Next, I will need to think more about the most compelling ways to combine some of these ideas (in addition to fleshing out the list, and adding more ideas). Now for today’s compost heap: 

• From the World of Story reading, “Twine and the Question of Literature” by Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop (full citation below)
  • Alan Liu’s concept of “the future literary” (164) — expands the definition of “literature” in a future where writing and technology work hand-in-hand — which feels very relevant to my question of what writing looks like when AI is used by the writer and/or reader.
    • Notes that With Those We Love Alive (and games in general) “awaken and serve our desire for alternative solutions, for a range of experiences not bound by traditional norms,” mediating between the literary, the virtual/technical, and the human/embodied, and perhaps offering an example of the “future literary” (169). What are other ways to imagine the future literary? What kinds of alternative solutions, what kinds of experiences that break traditional norms?
    • Distinguishes writing from “writing-as-art,” and says that as long as humans have a stake in the latter, this may be the literary future (169). This gets into the huge question of what counts as art… 
  • In With Those We Love Alive, readers/players are asked to draw on themselves, creating a form of “embodied writing” that sets up an entirely new dynamic within a predominantly digital work (168). This concept has stuck with me as I consider ways that the physical and the digital can interact within our new storytelling/writing contexts.
• V.E. Schwab’s monthly newsletter: I was struck this time by how this email newsletter gives a sense of comfort by explicitly evoking a shared physical location — inviting the reader in for tea, offering them a chair on the porch. Even when other written/digital media try to conjure this same effect, I have rarely felt it to be so effective. Can this be leveraged when thinking about storytelling (perhaps, again, the relationship to place in a mostly digital storytelling context)?
• Janice Mackay’s talk during the World of Story intensive also offered a few ideas that stuck with me. In particular, she mentioned the old adage that stories are told eye to eye, mind to mind, heart to heart. This feels ripe for symbolic interpretation and expansion. She also framed oral/traditional storytelling as a way of mutually sharing life stories — saying, “You tell me your life story, and I’ll tell you mine.” This idea of storytelling expanding beyond the bounds of a particular predetermined narrative, to encompass entire lives, was quite compelling to me. 

Work cited:
Salter, Anastasia, and Stuart Moulthrop. “Twine and the Question of Literature.” Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives, Amherst College Press, 2021, pp. 135–72. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.12255695.8. Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.

Chapter 1: Ideas upon Ideas / Anja Hendrikse Liu by is licensed under a