Since 1995, the electronic book review has published essays on writing machines, literary writing with machines and machines in literature. We now expect to publish essays on a new form of machine-writing. In early 2023, generative artificial intelligence, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) entered mainstream awareness. AI creativity, in almost all domains of digital communication, continues to be awe-inspiring, weird, silly, and deeply disturbing in the many implications of a machine that easily mimics human expression. And yet, it is human language (not computer code) that is the primary method by which these tools take instruction and learn. As Scott Rettberg recently wrote in an AI writing listserv: “writing, interlocution, becomes the essential thing again.”
AI technology and its cultural impacts are changing so rapidly that ebr editors are now opening the journal to more informal submissions for the machine-writing thread. Along with the traditional essay, we welcome blog posts, riPOSTes, reviews of AI art or AI tools, audio/visual media, transcribed conversations or interREviews, marginal glosses and experimental notes on a creative practice.
– Will Luers, ebr Managing Editor