My creative writing students reject AI for their own work, not out of some desire to virtue-signal but because to them, it defeats the point. Writing isn’t about producing text, it’s about thinking through a problem, finding the words for a feeling or an argument, shaping a story into something that could only have come from them. A simple writing workshop teaches what AI can’t: how to sit with someone else’s half-formed idea and help them find it. How to give feedback that doesn’t flatten or undermine. How to think across difference without sorting people into types.
Recently, I tried an exercise. I asked students to write on a piece of paper an object that mattered to them, then pass it to the person sitting next to them. The person receiving it had to write – quickly, associatively, whatever came – what they knew about that object.
One student received the word ring. He wrote a list of associations: wedding ring, Lord of the Rings, Ring doorbell, gold band – and then, almost as an afterthought, love and responsibility, because he had just got married. We then asked Chat GPT What do you know about a ring? It returned a similar-ish list: wedding ring, Tolkien, Ring doorbell. But not love and responsibility. Because, clearly, ChatGPT has never been married. It has never stood in front of someone and read vows and meant it.
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Another student received the word guitar. She wrote a long, vivid description of watching the lead guitarist of her favourite rock band smash up his guitar on stage – the noise, the feeling, what it meant to her at 17. ChatGPT gave us a serviceable account of the parts of a guitar: neck, frets, strings, body. Accurate and competent but entirely depersonalised.
This is the difference. Not intelligence, exactly – but embodiment of that intelligence. The self that has lived somewhere, loved someone, been a body in a room at a particular moment. That’s what writing draws on, and that’s what the workshop trains: the capacity to locate yourself in your experience and make it available to someone else. It teaches the student that knowing something isn’t just asking ChatGPT but it’s also located in the body, in memory, sensation, experience.
As AI automates text production, we should be doubling down on what it can’t know – the collective human practices that make critical thinkers, not just content producers. Instead, we’re making seminar groups bigger, replacing face-to-face teaching with online, cutting evening courses. We’re training people to think like algorithms rather than with each other.
The workshop method of writing from a given prompt and sharing the results is a unique practice at this institution, and one on which we might need to rely much more as AI colonises the curriculum.
Because the exercise didn’t end with the writing, it ended with the sharing. When the student who had written about the guitar read her piece aloud, something happened in the room. Others recognised the feeling – not the specific rock band, not the specific moment, but the experience of being a teenager and having your chest cracked open by music. Someone else said they’d written about a vinyl record their father had given them. Someone else mentioned a mixtape made for them by an old lover.
A conversation opened up about memory, grief, what objects hold for us and why. No AI can do that – it doesn’t move through the world as an embodied self. Whatever it knows is coded, predictive. It cannot sit in a room with other people and feel the temperature change when someone says something true.
This is what the philosopher Simone Weil understood about attention: that it is not passive reception but an active orientation toward the other. “Attention,” she wrote, “is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” The creative writing workshop is, at its best, a sustained practice of exactly that, students learning to pay a particular quality of attention to each other’s experience, not just their own.
The futurists are suddenly ditching the old mantra that everyone needs to learn to code, insisting instead that the future belongs to those who can think, reason and empathise – who have developed what they call emotional intelligence and an awareness of the subjectivity of others. They are describing, without quite knowing it, what the creative writing workshop has been doing for decades.
What this means practically is resisting the pressure to make workshops bigger. Resist the drift to online delivery for anything that depends on presence. Keep the rooms and the paper and the conversations afterwards, when students are still working out what they feel. If you teach in any discipline that involves writing – and most do – consider building even a small workshop element into your courses: a prompt, a timed response, a read-aloud and a brief group discussion. It takes 20 minutes but it does something no large language model can ever replicate.
Fear and grief are what I mostly witness in the classroom right now. Fear of replacement, grief for the dreams the students are losing. These feelings are real and they deserve a serious response. The workshop is one, it says: your experience matters, your voice is irreplaceable, and the most important thing you can do here is pay attention to yourself, and to each other.
Julia Bell is an author and professor of new writing at Birkbeck, University of London. Her new book, Between the Lines: Life Lessons from the Writing Workshop, came out on 7 May 2026.
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