Planning for this collection began in 2019; ChatGPT arrived in November 2022, and the volume ended up documenting the aftershocks. Its subject is less artificial intelligence as depicted in fiction than what generative systems have done to authorship, literary creativity and criticism.

Slocombe and Liveley organize the ground with a short typology of how the West has imagined artificial minds: animated objects, automata, androids, and then algorithms with no body beyond their code, sorting the world's data and perhaps positioned to govern it. To these they add a fifth figure thrown up since 2022, the machine as author, apparently able to write poems, jokes, scripts and criticism, though whether that counts as creativity is disputed, not least by working writers.

Readers wanting studies of AI characters in novels and films are pointed elsewhere. The chapters gathered here work the overlap between two concepts, asking what studying, researching and writing literature now mean.