Is AI making us less creative?: An Oxford-style debate

​This house believes AI is making us less creative.

​The machines may have made us faster. Whether they can create something truly novel is another question, one we are settling the old-fashioned way, with an Oxford-style debate.

​We'll take an audience vote on the motion when you arrive and again after closing arguments. The winner is the one that moves the most votes. So come with an opinion and be prepared to change your mind.

​Expect sharp arguments and, as always, plenty of time to meet the other founders, writers, and founder-writers in the room afterwards.

Final speaker list to be announced.

​Organizers

• ​Alys Key: is editor of The Londoner. She was previously features editor at Digital Frontier and before that was deputy money and business editor at The i Paper. She also writes about technology and politics on her Substack UK 2.0.

• ​Eleanor Warnock: a writer and communications expert who writes a newsletter on AI and writing. She has written for The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, and was deputy editor at Sifted and managing editor at the Reid Hoffman-backed AI publication Every.

​Speakers

• ​Archie Hall is The Economist's acting economics editor. Alongside running the paper's global economics coverage, he also writes regularly on the political, economic and social implications of AI. Before The Economist, he was a macro investor at Bridgewater Associates. He blogs, intermittently, at https://notes.archie-hall.com/.

• ​Bruno Marnette is a repeat entrepreneur with an Oxford PhD who was part of the technical leadership at Meta and Palantir. He is an expert in AI products augmenting creativity and critical thinking, and runs the Taste Bench Project, an independent research initiative focused on understanding, measuring, and improving the taste-adjacent capabilities of AI.

• ​Marzia Niccolai spent 19 years at Google building products from App Engine to Arts & Culture, where she helped photograph the world's artworks at ultra-high resolution and later shipped its first generative AI experiences. She co-founded an AI finance app Francis and is currently working on continuous learning AI at Fractal Brain.

• ​Paloma Ruiz is a sociologist and communicator who works at the intersection of gender equity, culture, and change. Her path has taken her through creative agencies, marketing teams, human rights collectives, and corporate consultancy, and she brings all of it into the workshops, sessions, and talks she leads, spaces designed to open new perspectives. As a researcher, she explores feminist collective action and how music and sound become tools of resistance.

​​About The Founder-writer Collective

​Writers are now founders. From Emily Sundberg's "studio mindset" to Ashlee Vance's bet on independent storytelling, professional writers own and operate their own brands.

​At the same time, company founders increasingly see the value in being writing-first practitioners. By thinking and writing in public, they create new opportunities and cultivate a point of view. In the tradition of Warren Buffett and Paul Graham, by way of Julie Zhuo, founders are now writers.

​Since our founding in June, 2026, the Founder-Writer Collective has brought together over 150 curious professionals in person to discuss the future of writing, editing, and content creation as a professional tool, and has built a digital community of over 600. Join our mailing list to find out about future events.

​This event is generously hosted by Granola.