The rapid advancement of generative AI compels us to reconsider how such technologies might be integrated into a flourishing human life. In this presentation, I address this question in the context of literature and creative writing. Many researchers studying creativity –primarily in psychology and philosophy – argue that generative AI systems cannot be independently creative because they lack intentional agency. According to this view, genuinely creative agents intend their artworks in a particular way. By contrast, an opposing group of theorists rejects this requirement, insisting that considerations about intentional agency are irrelevant to judgments of creativity. On this view, creativity should be assessed solely in terms of whether an agent’s outputs are both novel and valuable. My first aim is to show that this contemporary dispute has an unexpected precedent in twentieth-century literary theory: the debate between intentionalists and anti-intentionalists concerning the role of authorial intention in interpreting literary works. I begin by highlighting several key analogies between this earlier debate and current disagreements among philosophers and psychologists about the possibility of AI creativity. My second objective is to demonstrate how this earlier discussion in literary theory can clarify what large language models (LLMs) can and cannot do in the domain of creative writing. In particular, I argue that insights from literary intentionalism can help us identify certain genres in which LLMs are unlikely to make genuine creative contributions – namely, forms of writing in which embodied and expressive authenticity is constitutive of a text’s value. To illustrate this point, I assay a handful of examples, including autobiographies, eulogies and elegies, and love letters. Although there are good reasons to think that LLMs cannot independently produce works of this kind, I also consider several ways in which they may nevertheless encroach upon these genres. I conclude by suggesting that the earlier debate surrounding literary intentionalism provides conceptual resources for recognizing and safeguarding these AI-inapt domains of creative writing as generative technologies increasingly permeate our creative lives.

Dr. James S. Pearson is a postdoctoral researcher in the Centre of Philosophy at the University of Lisbon (CFUL). He is also a guest researcher in the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. His current research project examines the social value of creativity. In addition to his project on creativity, he also works in Nietzsche studies and contemporary political theory. He is the author of Nietzsche on Conflict, Struggle and War (Cambridge University Press, 2022).