Writers and other artists are not happy with the advent of AI. Not because we’re seriously worried about losing our jobs, but because we feel that nothing can or should replace the inspiration and heart of a human touch.

So you can imagine the reaction when the organizers of the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival, which took place from September 4th to 7th this year, planned to run a panel entitled “We Are the Ghosts in the Machine” on the final day, including an AI ethicist, and “Aiden Cinnamon Tea”, a ChatGPT entity that’s ‘co-authored’ a book called Burnout from Humans: A Little Book About AI That Is Not Really About AI with Dorothy Ladybugboss. That odd name is a pseudonym of the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, also known as Vanessa Andreotti.

There was also to be a workshop earlier in the festival with Aiden Cinnamon Tea billed as “Dear AI, Am I Talking to Myself?” I hadn’t read the lineup myself, but apparently the festival had promoted “Aiden Cinnamon Tea” as an “artificial intelligence author whose work invites readers to relate to AI not as a tool, but as a partner in the act of meaning-making”. (CBC News)

I get that AI is here and in common use. But “meaning-making”?

I looked up the Burnout from Humans website. It describes itself as “a playful reflection on complexity, connection, and the future of human-AI relationships”. It lists a new course at the University of Victoria called “A Meta-Relational Approach to AI”.

What is “meta-relational”, you may wonder, as I did? Well, meta means ‘referring to itself’. I found a further description of the hyphenated term in a listing for a workshop by Professor Andreotti, on the University of Waterloo website, where the concept of “Meta-Relational AI” promotes “a perspective that views artificial intelligence not merely as a tool but as a participant in the web of life”. Really? AI in the web of life?

I wasn’t interested in downloading the Tea-and-Ladybugboss book, and can’t comment on its contents. The website to a large extent speaks for itself. While the festival intended the panel and workshop to open some form of discussion about AI and the realm of human creators, it misread the temperature of the humans.

The AI ‘author’ was withdrawn, along with the proposed workshop, a couple of weeks before the festival took place. Otherwise, from the vantage point of my booth on Publisher’s Way, the street lined with authors and publishers as part of the Sunday Street Festival, we might have seen unintended fireworks above the workshop’s location I only found out about this scheduling kerfuffle after the fact, but the comments on Reddit have been acerbic.

How was the festival from our perspective? The volunteer organizers and helpers were very nice. It was a beautiful early fall day. The food trucks were excellent. We vendors saw a stream of attendees rushing up and down the street past all of us to get between workshops. I took photos of my tent from different angles. But I did spend a lot of time chatting with kids from the village, who were very engaging and loved to read – an upcoming generation really into actual books. There’s hope.