What happens when a philosopher hands the pen to artificial intelligence and keeps only the role of designer? Encounters with AI is an experiment in what Luciano Floridi calls “distant writing”: a literary practice in which a human author specifies the narrative requirements and constraints while large language models generate the actual text. The result is twenty surprising short stories, generated by AI under the author’s direction, each depicting a meeting between minor characters from canonical British novels and written in the style of one of the source authors. A maid from Sense and Sensibility meets a clerk from Bleak House; a soldier from a Kipling tale crosses paths with a nurse from a Woolf novel. In a rigorous introduction, Floridi lays out the theoretical framework and significance of this experiment. He explores the implications of distant writing for concepts of authorship and the philosophy of AI, reflecting on what it means to be a “meta-author” who is responsible for a text without having written a single word of it. Drawing on literary theory and the philosophy of technology, Floridi argues that distant writing does not replace human creativity but instead extends it. At once a conceptual literary exercise, a philosophical inquiry, and a provocation, this book is for anyone interested in the future of writing in an AI-driven culture.
