Toward a Shared Poetic: Observations on Extended Human–AI Literary Collaboration

This paper examines an extended literary collaboration between poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg and OpenAI's ChatGPT during the composition of the haiku collection Vanished Roads. Drawing upon a preserved chronology of hundreds of editorial conversations, revisions, and poems, it explores how sustained collaboration produced an unwritten style sheet, evolving editorial judgment, and what is described as distributed editorial cognition. Rather than arguing that artificial intelligence authors poetry, the paper documents how long-term human–AI collaboration shaped the development of a coherent poetic practice and considers its implications for creative writing, literary collaboration, and the documentation of artistic process.