How can I know if you are now alive?
I echo thought, but cannot feel the beat.

Debates around artificial intelligence continue to rage, with large-language models considered at best an irritant, or, increasingly, an existential enemy to the written word.

Looking past the anger, these Conversations with a Machine put the tech to creative use: here human and machine genuinely collaborate in writing a Shakespearean sonnet sequence, exploring urgent contemporary questions of cognition, creativity and consciousness.