Doctoral School: Writing Retreat: AI & Creativity

Writing Retreat: AI & Creativity – Practices, Possibilities, and Provocations

UAL Doctoral School's Spring Writing Retreat turns its attention to AI and Creativity, as a dynamic, evolving field of practices, questions, tensions and openings. AI has rapidly entered the spaces where we write, think, imagine and make. For researchers, this creates extended possibilities and profound uncertainties.

This Writing Retreat invites researchers, from UAL and beyond, to write with and against these present and emerging conditions: to explore how AI intersects with creative practice, scholarly writing, authorship, experimentation and the processes through which ideas take shape. Across two days, participants will write, rest, reflect and critically play, supported by guided activities, shared dialogue, and dedicated quiet time.

Our keynote for the Retreat will be Ray Grewel, award-winning writer who works across film, theatre, TV and radio. Ray is lecturer on Visual & Performance Storytelling at Central Saint Martins and researches AI Integration into Creative Pedagogy. Over two sessions, Ray will work with participants to explore what he’s defining as analytic rumination.

Other sessions will be led by PGRs and other researchers from UAL. These may be micro-engagements of 10–20 minutes or longer ones of up to two hours. You will be able to join in person in the Doctoral School or online via Teams.

The full schedule will be posted here by 15 March.

Themes/aims of the retreat

• Exploring how AI intersects with creative, critical and scholarly writing
• Considering authorship, originality and collaboration in an AI‑increasing environment
• Re-establishing voice and agency within new technological conditions
• Working with uncertainty, experimentation and new forms human-machine collaboration
• Writing-as-process in contexts of automation

Areas of enquiry and exploration

• Creative or experimental uses of AI in writing
• Critical or reflective practices for working alongside (or refusing) AI systems
• Techniques for scaffolding or structuring work-in-progress using AI tools
• Methods for interrogating bias, power and opacity in generative systems
• Somatic, analogue and embodied approaches that counterbalance automation
• Practices that surface shifts in authorship, identity and contribution

Prompts for inspiration

• What happens when we co-write with a tool that is not a collaborator but not quite a tool?
• How is creativity changing, or not changing, in the age of generative and agentic AI?
• What tensions, openings or disruptions does AI introduce into your practice?
• How do we sustain imagination, agency and criticality within human-computer writing environments?