Beyond the author: Artificial intelligence, creative writing and intellectual emancipation

Abstract

This study explores university students’ engagement with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools for creative writing and graphic storytelling, drawing on Jacques Rancière's philosophy of intellectual equality and emancipation. Qualitative data analysis from a co-curricular creative writing programme, including reflections, surveys, and focus-group interviews, reveals emerging artificial intelligence literacies and students’ improvisational aptitudes for interpreting, subverting, and transforming notions of authorship. Students decentred authorial attribution through the pragmatic adoption of the technology as a creative catalyst, negotiated creative conventions by adopting non-conventional communication strategies, and reconceptualised creativity as distributed across human and non-human agents. Our approach of student-driven learning for autonomous exploration, sense-making, and criticality with GenAI indicates the potential for promoting conditions for students to exercise intellectual equality and emancipation. The findings contribute to the understanding of authorship and creativity; begin to contour emerging GenAI literacies and competencies; and suggest that creative collaborations with GenAI may be a promising way to foster emancipatory practices in the classroom, while nurturing creative and critical skills.