I'm a lecturer again

Well, after a 20-year gap, I’m a lecturer again.

Last week I taught a class at Oxford Brookes University to the MA Publishing students.

The topic was AI in Storytelling – will AI be able to write better than you?

Short answer: yes and no (what did you expect?)

To begin, we defined AI with a focus on creative writing and publishing. We went through its adoption in publishing as things currently stand. Audio, translations and marketing are all making rapid gains and there is a lot of experimentation going on elsewhere. We looked at some early as well as some very bad examples of AI generated creative writing. And then we switched gears. We built a writing strategy using Chain of Thought prompting and saw results.

Pretty good results.

Back off girls. It’s my Swedish mermaid book and it’s going to be big!

We concluded by looking at AIs role in the editing and manuscript acquisition process. That was the easiest part of the lecture for me because it’s the Storywise sweet spot. We’re already helping some great publishing houses identify promising submissions while improving efficiencies. It was hard to shut me up.

The pleasure was all mine, and I’m looking forward to giving the class again next year (if not sooner).