Toward a Shared Poetics: A Case Study in Long-Term Human–AI Literary Collaboration

Most published discussions of artificial intelligence and creative writing ask whether AI can generate poems. This article examines a different question: what happens when a poet and a language model engage in sustained editorial collaboration over hundreds of poems rather than isolated prompts? Using the complete chronological record of the poems that eventually produced Vanished Roads, together with contemporaneous recollections from the human author and structural observations from the language model, this study documents the gradual emergence of an unwritten style sheet, the evolution of editorial judgment, and the development of a shared poetic vocabulary. Rather than arguing that artificial intelligence authored poetry, the article proposes that prolonged collaboration produced a form of distributed editorial cognition in which lived experience and accumulated editorial memory became mutually reinforcing. The resulting body of work subsequently appeared in dozens of independent literary journals, providing an external record of the collaboration's development beyond the workshop in which it originated.