Late on Friday, August 15, the Eden Mills Writers Festival in Eden Mills, Ontario, made a programming announcement they expected would create both conversation and controversy. They would be hosting artificial intelligence author, Aiden Cinnamon Tea, a ChatGPT entity that has co-authored a book called Burnout from Humans: A Little Book About AI That Is Not Really About AI with Dorothy Ladybugboss, the name given by the AI to academic Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, also known as Vanessa Andreotti, Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria.

Aiden is said to be trained on the work of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective and the writings of Andreotti, so that it has “an Indigenous sensibility and a focus on relational responsibility.”

The slated programming was a panel entitled “We Are the Ghosts in the Machine” to be held on Sept. 7, with AI ethicist Christopher DiCarlo, and authors Michael Redhill and Sean Michaels, who in his most recent novel, Do You Remember Being Born?, explored AI’s impact on creativity, and generated the literary work of one of the book’s characters using AI chatbots. Aiden Cinnamon Tea was to participate “voice-to-voice, via tablet.”

In the announcement, the festival’s director said the panel was “not about asking what AI can do, as a tool or point of extraction, it’s about what AI is asking of us, what it’s showing us about ourselves…. we’re not staging a debate on productivity or public policy, we’re making space for a new kind of literary encounter, one that acknowledges AI’s creative presence while holding it in conversation with our human histories, responsibilities, and dreams.”

In addition to the panel, a workshop scheduled earlier in the festival with Aiden Cinnamon Tea billed as “Dear AI, Am I Talking to Myself?” was announced.

Feedback online to the news was highly critical, as AI is trained on the works of writers often in violation of copyright. OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, is facing multiple lawsuits for violating copyright. Critic and author (and former Q&Q editor) Steven Beattie, on his blog “That Shakespearean Rag” (paid content), wrote about the negative reaction to the Eden Mills announcement from authors, along with an in-depth critique of the programming decision.

By the evening of August 17, the festival had posted on social media that based on the reactions from the community the workshop was cancelled but that the panel discussion on “AI ethics” would go forward featuring “author voices from literature, law, and policy,” suggesting, but not explicitly stating, that the panel would now include only human participants. The change was generally received positively online as the right decision by the festival.

On the Eden Mills schedule the panel now includes Shawn Van Sluys – elsewhere referred to as a “human co-weaver” with Aiden – the executive director of the Guelph-based Musagetes, a foundation that states as its mandate the promotion of “the arts and artistic creativity as tools for social transformation.”

The Eden Mills Festival runs Sept. 4–7, including events in Rockwood and Guelph, with the bulk of author events and the street festival taking place on Sept. 7 in Eden Mills.