The AI Literary Review is no longer accepting submissions, and will not be publishing future issues. The website will remain online, and each issue will remain free to read, for the forseeable future.

There are two reasons for this closure: First is that I (the editor) have less free time to dedicate to the journal than I did when it first began. Second, and most important, is that I believe the project has now fulfilled its purpose, and demonstrated what it set out to demonstrate: that AI tools can be used to produce genuinely creative work, as long as the people using them are doing so creatively.

The aim of the AI Literary Review was to establish the role, purpose, and value of human poets in an age when ‘poetry’ can be assembled by machine. After 18 months and 60 poems, I believe this question has been answered: The role of the human poet in a post-AI world – the thing which humans can do, which AI tools cannot – is to write intentionally.

Humans think with cognisance, and assemble words deliberately. Human-authored poems can therefore correspond to their authors’ embodied experiences, heartfelt feelings, and sincerely-held beliefs or uncertainties. Unlike humans, GenAIs do not think at all. They compute, without comprehension of what any word means, and therefore assemble words without intention. Their poems are shaped by probability, not lived experience, and refer to nothing beyond the bounds of their own language models.

Enacting one’s intentions through the deliberate assembly of words is what imbues human writing with meaning. Enacting intention is what makes a piece of writing sincere or authentic. Furthermore, assembling words deliberately rather than mathematically is what makes human writing creative, and intentionless AI generation uncreative.

With the AI Literary Review, I set out to find and document how human poets are enacting their own intentions when working with GenAI, in spite of the fact these tools are inherently intention-inhibiting. How might humans use GenAI tools to write intentionally, rather than generate mathematically?

I feel very privileged to have shared each poem which was included in the review, and believe all of them to be interesting, exciting, and unique to their authors’ own enacted intentions. Importantly, I believe the strength these poems comes not from the tools they were composed with, but from the ingenuity of the human poets doing the composing. In each submission period, the poems which stood out were the ones where human ideas were guiding the AI tools, and not the other way around.

Many of our published poets enacted their intentions by editing the GenAI’s outputs, or pre-disposing their GenAI to generate particular things. In this way, it might be said that the GenAI tools haven’t helped our human poets to enact their intentions at all – rather than working with GenAI tools, our poets have been working against them, by deliberately preventing or un-doing any unintentional assemblages of words. In each issue of the review, GenAI tools appeared to be obstacles which human poets had to overcome if they wished to enact their own intentions, or foster/protect their own authorships.

When AI tools are deployed deliberately and intentionally, they can be used to produce work which is sincere, inventive, and authentically human-authored. Every poem in the review is both a testament to this, and a demonstration of how human intentionality can override the intentionless assembly of GenAIs. However, while the review has shown that human poets can use GenAI tools without necessarily forfeiting their own intentionality, it hasn’t found a clear advantage to doing so.

This is not to say that GenAI tools have no place in human-authored creative works (they work well as inspirers, proof-readers, first-draft-makers, and more), it’s only to say that, in order to use GenAI and maintain individual authorship, one has to work just as deliberately and intentionally as they would if they weren’t using GenAI at all.

There’s still plenty of experimenting, researching, refining and documenting to be done at the intersection of human creativity and GenAI. Those writing and reading human-AI literature should check out journals such as re•mediate and Ensemble Park (if they haven’t done so already!) where this exciting work is still taking place.

I want to thank everyone who has read, shared, supported, submitted to, and entrusted their work to the AI Literary Review over the past 18 months. I’m grateful to every one of you for your help in building and sustaining this archive of original, human-authored, AI-inflected work.

I hope that the journal will continue to serve as a source of inspiration and information into the future. Human writers need not fear GenAI – it cannot do what we do. Furthermore, we remain capable of creativity, sincerity, and inventiveness, whether we choose to use GenAI tools or not.

_{- Dan Power, editor, 4 December 2025}