A Wild Run - A Human Response to A.I. Writing Prompts

At the beginning of February this year, a post from AuthorThreads danced across my feed. It was a shout into the void for independent authors to create an anthology together, and it certainly piqued my interest.

A post on Threads from the account Sosawin which reads: "Indie authors- What if I gave us a writing prompt... then we all wrote a single chapter based on that prompt... then we compiled and published said chapters and an Anthology It would be such a rad way to see just how uniquely individual each mind is. — The post that originated it all

What began as @sosawnin’s call to action for an indie author anthology transformed into a newly formed Discord server dedicated to manifesting that exact purpose. Over the next few months, we gathered our crew of authors, chose the prompt, and then dedicated ourselves each to drafting, editing, and typesetting our stories.

The prompt in question:

“Your main character is running through the woods. Why?”

Introducing, A Wild Run.

A promotional graphic for the anthology book "A Wild Run" which reads: A blended genre anthology made by an all human team. We wanted to showcase the beauty of human individuality the best way we could - by writing it. All proceeds will be donated to charities of choice. — The cover art for our blended genre anthology, “A Wild Run”

Safe to say we all had wildly different takes on the prompt. It was vague enough to give us the breathing space we needed to handle our various genres, and intriguing enough to set us off to a fast start. However, during the writing process, amid subsequent discussions between the authors, the idea of the book slowly evolved from its original purpose, and it became a bit of a rallying call against the relentlessly oncoming A.I. writing controversy all authors have had to give an opinion on lately.

This anthology quickly gained momentum and became our statement against the use of A.I. in writing. Why would you use A.I. to write a story when there are so many talented authors out there who could do a million times better? Each author was given the same prompt, and a variety of unique ideas emerged, resulting in A Wild Run, our anthology, which is set to released on September 6th with all proceeds going to charity. You can pre-order the ebook version here.

Look out for my story based on the California wildfires, titled “All I Could Carry.” It features a man on a wild dash through fire-stricken woods as he tries to corral his pet cat and get them both out alive. Let me know if you like it!

(p.s. Yes this is the new project I teased in my last post. I’ve got some other blogs coming soon talking about why I spent a decade on writing novels, some fun writing hardware, and my favorite writing apps. Also let me know if you want to hear what I really have to say about A.I. Thats such a big topic that I can’t really fully cover in this post.)

Until next time!

Spencer