Authored Into Existence: AI, Alternative Work, and the Profession of Creative Writing
Lisa Bowman
MS in Applied AI, Belhaven University
AAI 503
Dr. Danielle Babb
August 29, 2026
Authored Into Existence: AI, Alternative Work, and the Profession of Creative Writing
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; without Him nothing was made that has been made (New International Version Bible, 1978/2011, John 1:1–3). We are, therefore, literally authored into existence. In Him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28), created and sustained by the power of His word (Hebrews 1:3). The profession of creative writing has a profound connection to the Word, whether or not the writer acknowledges it. Every novelist, poet, and essayist works in the medium God used to create reality itself. This paper analyzes how alternative work trends and artificial intelligence are reshaping the profession, and suggests where writers can adapt, drawing on Schwartz’s (2021) framework and my own research.
The alternative work model Schwartz describes in Work Disrupted has long been a fact of life for creative writers. Writers often work freelance, creating an oeuvre over time, and receive royalties rather than wages. Schwartz (2021) describes how the industrial revolution converted work from craftsmanship, such as the cobbler building one product from beginning to completion, into collections of distinct tasks. Creative writing remains one of the last craft professions. An individual writer conceives, drafts, revises, and finishes a whole work. Using AI may turn that craft into delegated tasks. Ideas, drafts, editing, formatting, and even marketing copy can be done by AI. We see more AI-generated content daily being used by some writers who do work-for-hire copywriting, formulaic genre production, and content marketing. Discoverability is also shifting from search engines toward AI assistants, so a writer invisible to the machines may become invisible to readers who increasingly ask AI systems to find information for them.
The reshaping of the profession is arriving through active controversies. Creativity itself is contested. Large language models are made of language and generate output that is original in its combination of words. This leads to debate about whether an AI can be creative.
The key process of creative thinking in humans is the ability to access remotely related concepts. Current AI chatbots have a vast memory and the ability to quickly access large databases. Therefore, one might hypothesize that AI chatbots will outperform humans in the associative component of divergent thinking, and thus in the originality of responses. (Koivisto & Grassini, 2023, p. 2)
This research finds that AI chatbots now match or exceed average human performance on divergent thinking tasks, while the best human writers still outperform the machines. In other words, some machines are better creative writers than some humans. Authorship and credit are unsettled. If a writer uses AI to draft fiction or poetry, who should receive the credit? What is the boundary between legitimate assistance and misrepresentation? Publishing is developing a disclosure standard, but in the meantime, the lines are blurred.
A major controversy in the profession of creative writing is the use of copyrighted material for training data. When one copy of a book is bought and used to train billions of instances, is that fair to the writer? In the July 2026 Bartz v. Anthropic settlement, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion—the largest copyright settlement in history, approximately $3,000 per work for roughly half a million books—for having acquired authors’ books from pirated libraries to train its models (Authors Guild, 2026). The court found that training on lawfully purchased books was fair use, an important ruling for the future of creative writing. Illegal piracy produced the liability finding. Lawsuits against OpenAI, Google, and Meta are still unresolved. The economic relationship between authors and AI companies is being negotiated in real time.
Meanwhile, the alternative-work aspects of the profession intensify. Writers are running their own small businesses, working on publishing, copyright management, taxation, and relationships with their readers on Substack, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media, not just writing words. Some of this may be augmented by AI, but there is a risk of losing human readers if too much seems artificial. There is a prejudice already forming against AI in creative fields: identical artworks are rated less favorably when labeled AI-created (Bellaiche et al., 2023).
Adaptation must be intentional and thoughtful. Creative writers can develop AI literacy, learning what the tools do well, using them transparently, and crediting their use, to maintain trust with their readership. Writers also must learn the new discovery layer in order to make their work legible to AI. Writers should also understand rights literacy from the recent court ruling. Only authors whose copyrights were properly registered qualified for settlement payments in Bartz; therefore, making sure the required paperwork is in order becomes essential.
From my Christian worldview, I think creative writing is still a unique and valuable profession. The writer is a sub-creator working in the Creator’s own medium. Large language models are new in the world, changing what writing will become. Schwartz (2021) argues that opportunity will dominate disruption for those who adapt with intention. The most imperative thing is for creative writers to maintain their individual, God-given voice. To sand off the edges into some generic, generated pattern would defeat the purpose of thousands of years of disparate literature. Unleashing the individual human mind into language to illuminate, educate, entertain, and stir the soul of other minds is how writers serve God in the world. Writing produces compassion. The originality of the individual writer is what makes it work. If we hand over our ability to write to a mass-producing, corporate-approved language model, we forfeit one of our greatest strengths. Adapting with intention means understanding AI’s best use for creative writing and maintaining human authenticity, whether or not the commas are all in the right places.
References
Authors Guild. (2026, July 21). Court grants final approval of $1.5 billion Anthropic copyright settlement. https://authorsguild.org/news/court-grants-final-approval-anthropic-copyright-settlement/
Bellaiche, L., Shahi, R., Turpin, M. H., Ragnhildstveit, A., Sprockett, S., Barr, N., Christensen, A., & Seli, P. (2023). Humans versus AI: Whether and why we prefer human-created compared to AI-created artwork. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 8, Article 42. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-023-00499-6
Koivisto, M., & Grassini, S. (2023). Best humans still outperform artificial intelligence in a creative divergent thinking task. Scientific Reports, 13, Article 13601. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-40858-3
New International Version Bible. (2011). Bible Gateway. https://www.biblegateway.com/ (Original work published 1978)
Schwartz, J. (2021). Work disrupted: Opportunity, resilience, and growth in the accelerated future of work. Wiley.
Acknowledgment
The author acknowledges the use of Claude (Anthropic) for research assistance, source verification, and drafting support. All arguments, claims, and final wording are the author’s.