The essential AI + writing reading list from women and non-binary perspectives

A living primer of articles by women & non-binary people on artificial intelligence, creativity, and the future of writing.

📚 Since starting to read about AI and writing, I have kept a list of helpful, inspiring articles to share with friends or colleagues looking for a place to start.

💡 Comment to suggest an addition.

AI and Writing in Business and Technology

• What does AI mean for writers?: Best-selling author and marketing guru Ann Handley argues that you “can’t put AI in the hands of someone who can’t write and expect anything other than mediocre.”

• AI and the Last Mile: Scholar Hollis Robins (@hollisrobbins) writes, “While we worry about AI replacing human judgment, the real story may be how AI is creating a market for that judgment as a luxury good”.

• I’m a disabled writer. Here’s what I think of Nanowrimo’s AI statement. Anna Dallara, a disabled writer who wrote her Master’s thesis about GPT, writes about how AI is helping and hurting her.

• We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says. In late 2020, Google’s ethical AI team co-lead Timnit Gebru said she had been forced out of the company. Speculation is that it was over a paper, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?”, that revealed too many inconvenient truths about GenAI’s risks.

• How to Keep Your Writing Weird in the Age of AI. Katie Parrott writes for Every about AI as a “timid scribe” and when we need to push for more edges in our writing.

Cultural Analysis and AI Criticism

• The most valuable commodity in the world is friction

• You are not a parrot: NY Mag interviews computational linguist Emily M. Bender, co-author of “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots,” on AI and writing systems.

• The Great Language Flattening: Tech journo Vicki Turk in The Atlantic on AI’s sneaky influences on writing and communication.

• Am I Slop? Am I Agentic? Am I Earth?: Writer K Allado-McDowell asks how we can avoid becoming slop and maintain agency as AI transforms human identity.

• What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing: This quote is chef’s kiss: “ChatGPT, by producing competent writing with apparent thoughtlessness, threatens the idea that critical thinking is the core of good writing.”

• AI will never understand what makes writing great: Author Megan Nolan argues that the value of great writing lies in imperfection.

• Army of Me: Comedy writer Madeleine Brettingham opines on whether or not GenAI tools can be funny.

• Indigenous frameworks for AI: AI advisor and entrepreneur Suhair Khan writes that extractive capitalism does not have to be AI’s fate.

• Thinking is Becoming a Luxury Good: Journalist Mary Harrington writes that, “long-form literacy may soon become the domain of elite subcultures.”

• OpenAI Says Its LLM Can Write Creatively: Can a machine ever be truly creative?

Creative Writing

• Ghosts: This short story by Vauhini Vara was written with a predecessor of ChatGPT about her sister’s death and went viral upon publication.

• Shadow Rain: (In Japanese) Award-winning Japanese author Rie Qudan creates a short story with 95% AI.

Share other resources that you have enjoyed in the comments.