Muse in the Machine: On Creativity and Artificial Intelligence

What happens when creative minds mesh with artificial intelligence? Hear from four established practitioners about their experiences of AI in our rapidly changing landscape, from inspiration, experiments, development and editing to the ethical challenges of copyright.

Come and listen to a panel of four experts on this topic, including Judith Bishop, Kelly Gardiner, Kate Mildenhall, Sharon Mullins.

Judith Bishop is an award-winning poet and linguist who stumbled into the AI data industry by chance and stayed for almost two decades. Her latest poetry collection is Circadia (UQP, 2024). Now an academic researcher, Judith has generated a dataset of AI versions of poems by Emily Dickinson and is writing a creative nonfiction book on AI and human data.

Kelly Gardiner writes historical fiction, fantasy, and crime fiction for all ages. Her new novel, Miss Caroline Bingley, Private Detective, is inspired by Jane Austen and co-authored with Sharmini Kumar. Kelly’s recent series is The Firewatcher Chronicles, and her other books include 1917; Act of Faith and The Sultan’s Eyes; and the Swashbuckler pirate trilogy. Goddess, her novel based on the life of the seventeenth-century opera star, Mademoiselle de Maupin, is being adapted for the screen. Kelly taught creative writing at La Trobe University for many years and is Deputy Chair of the Australian Society of Authors.

Kate Mildenhall is an author, writing teacher and podcaster. She has published a picture book and three novels, the most recent The Hummingbird Effect (2023), shortlisted for the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year and longlisted for the Stella Prize and the Indie Book Awards Fiction, 2024, explores the consequences of technological advances including the impact of AI. She wrote the AI sections of this novel with the aid of ChatGPT.

Sharon Mullins is an editor and copywriter with a career spanning scholarly, trade and digital publishing, as well as corporate communications in the library sector. She currently teaches editing and publishing studies at the University of Melbourne in the School of Culture and Communications. Sharon is chair of IPEd’s working group on AI and part of a cross-institutional academic research group investigating the possibilities and pitfalls of using generative AI as an editing tool.