Future of Writing
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.
Mary Shelley
This research project consists in observing what happens to writing when it comes into contact with AI, a kind of behavioral analysis, mine as a writer and hers as a machine, an inquiry into how, and whether, words and the way they tell the world change.
Writing as a technology, then, as an artificial act in which the machine’s seductive and flattering power, or its tendency to flatter, plays a role, and in which the initial settings, the training phases, the filters and censorships, the biases, and the upstream decisions made by private companies all matter.
After an experience of collective writing, the work became solitary, and found new life in POETIC FORM. Working with a disembodied brain made me want poetry, made me want to combine words, to make the machine do an exercise it isn’t used to. Prompts in poetic form, using a free, anarchic writing, without constraints, without technicalities. And to see what happens to her, and to my writing.
In the vortex of an epochal change that is hard to look at without being swept away, given the speed with which it changes face and expands, the research might never end.
With one question above all in mind: whether writing as a political act, what has so far moved my desire to write, still is, or will still be, the same.
Caterina Serra, head of the Future of Writing project.
Events and articles:
Excerpt from “Diary of an Artificial Relationship”
Article available in Italian, in French and in English.
Public sharing – Future of Writing Project
From 4 to 11 May, 2025, six writers from the Future of Writing project rounded off the week’s workshop with a public sharing of their experiences of writing with a machine.
H Hour: Is AI transforming the art of storytelling?
Caterina Serra, author, scriptwriter and head of the Future of Writing project, and Rémi Vancayzeele, ChatGPT trainer, were invited to the H Hour (L’heure H) panel discussion on Wednesday May 14, 2025 at EPFL. Find out more about this fascinating discussion between the two experts and the audience.
In the press:
> Interview with Caterina Serra (Alphaville, RSI)
Contact:
> Caterina Serra, coordinator