A Poem is a Machine Made Out of Words: Writing and AI

​"A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words," wrote William Carlos Williams.

​Writing is not simply a printed artifact or a rush of text onscreen; it is itself a technology that extends the mind onto the page—by hand, by printing press, by word processor, and now, by AI. To write is to think: not to record what we already know, but to discover it in the act. If AI is the newest machine we have built out of words, what does it do to that act of discovery?

​Three authors who write with, about, and against AI will discuss how the technology is reshaping how we write and how we know. They will explore what literature, history, and art reveal about artificial intelligence and its development, and how AI and narrative have long remade each other, from the fictions that shaped the field to the field's own fictions about itself. Together, we ask: what do writers know that AI doesn’t, and how might we come to know differently?

​Co-presented with Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology.

​Panelists:

​Vanessa Chang is Director of Programs, Leonardo/ISAST, and author of The Body Digital: A Brief History of Humans and Machines from Cuckoo Clocks to ChatGPT (Melville House, 2025).

​Nina Beguš researches humanistic approaches to AI development at UC Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. She is author of Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI (University of Michigan Press, 2025) and editor of First Encounters with AI: Writers on Writing (University of Michigan Press, 2026).

Hannes Bajohr is Associate Professor of German at UC Berkeley and a writer of generative literature, including (Berlin, Miami), a novel co-written with a self-trained large language model. His essay “No One Writes Alone” appears in First Encounters with AI: Writers on Writing (2026).