AI books: new releases buzz

Writer and researcher Nina Beguš is using a new book release to stake out a fast-growing corner of publishing: books about how artificial intelligence is changing writing. (ninabegus.com) On her website, Beguš says her 2025 book *Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI* is already out from the University of Michigan Press. She also says she edited and introduced *First Encounters with AI*, a new essay collection due in October 2026 in the press’s Writers on Writing series. (ninabegus.com) The University of Michigan Press lists *First Encounters with AI* as a 208-page volume in paperback, hardcover, and ebook editions, with a November 2026 publication listing and preorders open at $19.95 for paperback and $60 for hardcover. The press page credits Beguš as editor and says the book includes 17 contributors. (press.umich.edu) That collection is built around a plain question: what happens to writing when language is no longer used only by humans. The press says the essays come from novelists, poets, screenwriters, translators, scholars, technologists, and language artists responding to large language models entering everyday creative work. (press.umich.edu) The contributor list gives the project literary weight. The press page names Ted Chiang, Sheila Heti, Ken Liu, Allison Parrish, Sasha Stiles, Qiufan Chen, Hannes Bajohr, and other writers and researchers in the table of contents. (press.umich.edu) Beguš’s own site places the book inside a broader research program on “artificial humanities,” her term for studying AI through literature, film, and other humanistic traditions. She says she leads research at the University of California, Berkeley on cultural imagination, writing creativity, and philosophy of science and technology. (ninabegus.com) Her earlier book makes that framework explicit. A BibliOpen listing for *Artificial Humanities* says the 2025 book examines fictional representations of AI alongside real technological development and is available as an open-access edition from the University of Michigan Press. (bibliopen.org) The new release arrives as publishers keep testing how to package AI for general readers: not only as engineering or business, but as a question about authorship, labor, and style. The press description for *First Encounters with AI* says the essays treat AI as a field of tension between creativity and computation rather than a single tool or single threat. (press.umich.edu) Beguš’s post on X turned that publishing update into a small social-media event, linking a forthcoming book to the wider online appetite for AI culture. The post itself was not fully retrievable through web search, but the book announcement it pointed to is corroborated by Beguš’s site and the University of Michigan Press listing. (ninabegus.com; press.umich.edu)