The book is available for preorders, which will be delivered in September. Outside of sale periods, please feel free to use UMWEB30 code for a 30% discount. You can also expect to see the book and e-book in bookstores (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.) closer to the publication date on November 17.
These same discounts apply to my recent monograph, Artificial Humanities, which is published under open access.
Related to the book is a new book series Artificial Humanities, launching at the University of Exeter Press. Please see the description of the series attached below, and feel free to send along any book pitches that might fit.
More on First Encounters with AI below
Introduction by Nina Beguš
Language Models and Desire: A Lexicon by Allison Parrish
Why AI Won’t Make Art Easy to Make by Ted Chiang
The Death of the Death of the Artist by Annelyse Gelman
On Writing Poets by Sasha Stiles
Linguistic Mirrors by James Yu
No One Writes Alone by Hannes Bajohr
The Art of Copying by Ken Liu
Deep Writing: A Hermetic Practice in LLMs Era by Qiufan Chen
Co-Writing with AI (Academic Style) by Joseph Dumit and Gerardo Con Diaz
Prayers, Essays, Poems and Games by Iain S. Thomas
Chasing Alice by Sheila Heti (just published in The Yale Review)
Ten Trillion Things I Hate About You by Nicholas Nardini
About Life by Jasmin B. Frelih
Novel Audiences by Katy Ilonka Gero
What If in the End by Alex Saum-Pascual
First Encounters with AI gathers some of today’s most original literary minds to explore one of the central artistic and cultural questions of our era: What happens to writing when language is no longer used only by humans? As large language models enter the public imagination and everyday creative practice, writers across genres—novelists, poets, screenwriters, essayists, translators, scholars, technologists, language artists—are grappling with profound shifts in how stories are conceived, crafted, and shared.
Allison Parrish, Ted Chiang, Annelyse Gelman, Sasha Stiles, James Yu, Hannes Bajohr, Ken Liu, Qiufan Chen, Joseph Dumit, Gerardo Con Diaz, Iain S. Thomas, Sheila Heti, Nicholas Nardini, Jasmin B. Frelih, Katy Ilonka Gero, and Alex Saum-Pascual reflect on their early, intimate encounters with generative text at a moment when artificial intelligence feels at once thrilling, unsettling, and unavoidable. Their essays portray AI not as a monolith, but as a dynamic field of possibility and tension between creativity and computation, where longstanding human questions about intention, desire, authorship, labor, and value gain new urgency. Ranging from deeply personal meditations to critical provocations, from philosophical investigations to playful experiments, these writers reveal how writing tools shape writing itself—and what is at stake when those tools begin to imitate us. Curated and introduced by editor Nina Beguš, First Encounters with AI offers readers an essential guide to navigating this new literary landscape. Together, these essays map the terrain of our first contact zone with AI, offering clarity, insight, and imaginative depth at a moment of radical change.