Last July, shortly after announcing that Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s speculative essay collection, A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content, had won Diagram’s 2023 chapbook contest, editor Ander Monson received a raft of text messages from concerned friends. He discovered that he and Diagram, a literary magazine that publishes chapbooks through New Michigan Press, were being excoriated on X (formerly Twitter) because Bertram had created the chapbook using artificial intelligence (AI).
“So many people were attacking us and Lillian-Yvonne for what they thought was an ethical breach,” Monson says. “They heard ‘AI-written book wins literary contest,’ which is not exactly what happened.” While Bertram did use AI, it was explicitly to engage the technology in an artistic experiment: Bertram employed a process called “fine-tuning” with
