An Unexpected Story: AI and the Writer
Geoff Davis and David Link

Summary

Geoff Davis and David Link explore text generation from early procedural systems to today's AI publishing controversies. Davis describes the backlash against generative AI in creative industries, including the Society of Authors' 'human-authored' initiative and publishers' fear of AI association. He then shows his 1985 Sinclair BASIC story generator, a procedurally driven work created during the BSE crisis, and later pieces such as Pattern City and Studio Walk and Talk, which blend generated text with animated grids and music. Link presents three projects: Poetry Machine (2001), an installation that searches the internet, builds semantic networks, and writes continuously on a ghost keyboard; Love Letters (2009), which revives Christopher Strachey's 1952 Manchester Mark 1 program and its recreated Williams-tube hardware; and Pandemonium (2024), a book of selected machine text collaged by a human author. The session ends with discussion of AI incompleteness, code as poetry, and the distinction between simulated and human thought.

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