The Future Is Now: Artificial Intelligence and the Literary World

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Thursday, 7:00 pm EDT March 12, 2026

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

Artificial intelligence is reshaping our world faster than most people can compute. For many in the literary world, the picture it paints is largely dystopian—especially when considering the ambitions of Big Tech and financial market executives.

Join us for a timely panel conversation about technology and moral responsibility in the age of AI with Dashiel Carrera, author of The Deer and Visiting Researcher in Computer Science at Columbia University; Tuhin Chakrabarty, Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department in Stony Brook University (SUNY); and Bruce Holsinger, author of Culpability and Professor of English at the University of Virginia, moderated by Maris Kreizman, columnist, essayist, and author of I Want to Burn This Place Down.

How will AI reshape critical thinking, storytelling, the publishing world, and the labor market for writers? And how can authors advocate for themselves and each other in the face of seemingly unchecked power and wealth? Together, the group will explore how fiction can illuminate the ethical stakes of emerging technologies—and what it can reveal about responsibility, power, and the futures we are already building.

We offer two in-person ticket options: the $10 Standard Ticket and the $40+ Supporter Ticket. Both provide the same access, but if you’re able, we kindly suggest registering for the Supporter Ticket to help sustain our programs.

Featuring

Dashiel Carrera

Dashiel Carrera

Dashiel Carrera is a novelist, Human-Centered AI researcher, and media artist. A Visiting PhD Researcher at Columbia University, his research explores how Generative AI will affect the trajectory of contemporary literature. Also the author of The Deer (Dalkey Archive Press, 2022) and an Assistant Editor at Conjunctions, his work has been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, LitHub, FENCE, and BOMB and his research has taken him to the MIT Media Lab and Harvard’s metaLab.
Tuhin Chakrabarty

Tuhin Chakrabarty

Tuhin Chakrabarty is Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stony Brook University (SUNY). Prior to this, he obtained his PhD from Columbia University. His research interests are broadly in AI, NLP, and Human-AI Interaction, and his work often relies on knowledge, methods, and perspectives from multiple disciplines to address complex problems that cannot be fully understood or solved within the boundaries of Computer Science. Tuhin’s work has been covered in MIT Tech Review, Bloomberg, and the Washington Post, and he has received a Best Paper Honorable Mention award at ACM CHI and an Outstanding Position Paper award at ICML. Most recently, his research on Generative AI and Fair Use has been profiled by the New Yorker, and his empirical findings on market dilution and substitution effects are being used by leading U.S. law firms in ongoing AI copyright litigation.
Bruce Holsinger

Bruce Holsinger

Bruce Holsinger is the author of Culpability, named the 116th selection of Oprah’s Book Club and longlisted for the 2026 Aspen Words Literary Prize. His four previous novels include The Gifted School, winner of the Colorado Book Award; The Displacements, the inaugural title in the United Nations Read for Action Book Club; and The Invention of Fire and A Burnable Book, historical novels set in medieval London. He’s also written numerous works of nonfiction, most recently On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and many other publications, and he has been profiled on NPR’s Weekend Edition, Here & Now, and Marketplace. He is the editor of the quarterly journal New Literary History as well as a frequent instructor at WriterHouse, a nonprofit in Charlottesville. He teaches English at the University of Virginia and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Photo Credit: Tom Cogill
Maris Kreizman

Maris Kreizman

Maris Kreizman is the author of I Want to Burn This Place Down (Ecco Books, 2025). She’s an essayist and columnist for Literary Hub whose work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, and Esquire. She hosted The Maris Review, an intimate author interview podcast, from 2018 to 2023. A former board member of the National Book Critics Circle, she has served as a judge for the annual NBCC Awards as well as for the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. She was previously the editorial director of Book of the Month, the editorial director of digital content at barnesandnoble.com, and a publishing outreach lead at Kickstarter. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and her books.

Photo Credit: Mindy Tucker

Featured Books

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The Deer

By Dashiel Carrera

Published by Deep Vellum

PURCHASE

The Deer is a rhythmic, surrealist psychological thriller about a physicist who hits—what appears—to be a deer. As he returns from the scene of the accident to his childhood home, long-forgotten memories flood his consciousness, and he must come to terms with the fact that his past, and reality as he knows it, are not what they appear. Part experimental film, part jazz record, but always lyrical, luminous, and austere, The Deer is a poignant meditation on familial love, loss, and the mystery at the heart of existence.
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Culpability

By Bruce Holsinger

Published by Spiegel & Grau

PURCHASE

When the Cassidy-Shaws’ autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver’s seat, with his father, Noah, riding shotgun. In the back seat, tweens Alice and Izzy are on their phones, while their mother, Lorelei, a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence, is absorbed in her work. Yet each family member harbors a secret, implicating them all in the tragic accident.

During a weeklong recuperation on the Chesapeake Bay, the family confronts the excruciating moral dilemmas triggered by the crash. Noah tries to hold the family together as a seemingly routine police investigation jeopardizes Charlie’s future. Alice and Izzy turn strangely furtive. And Lorelei’s odd behavior tugs at Noah’s suspicions that there is a darker truth behind the incident—suspicions heightened by the sudden intrusion of Daniel Monet, a tech mogul whose mysterious history with Lorelei hints at betrayal. When Charlie falls for Monet’s teenaged daughter, the stakes are raised even higher in this propulsive family drama that is also a fascinating exploration of the moral responsibility and ethical consequences of AI.

Culpability explores a world newly shaped by chatbots, autonomous cars, drones, and other nonhuman forces in ways that are thrilling, challenging, and unimaginably provocative.

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I Want to Burn This Place Down

By Maris Kreizman

Published by HarperCollins

PURCHASE

At the heart of this funny, acerbic, and bravely honest book of essays is Maris Kreizman, a former rule follower and ambition monster who once believed the following truths to be self-evident: that working very hard would lead to admission to a good college, which would lead to a good job at a good company, which would then lead to personal fulfillment and a sense of purpose, along with adequate health care and eventual home ownership and plenty of money waiting in a retirement account. Like any good Democrat and feminist, she believed that if she just worked hard and played by the rules, she was guaranteed a safe and comfortable life.

Now in her forties, the only thing Maris Kreizman knows for sure is that she no longer has faith in American institutions or any of their hollow promises. Now she knows that the rules are meant to serve some folks better than others; and, actually, they serve no one all that well—not even Kreizman. Disturbed by the depth and scope of the liberal myths in which she once so fervently believed, Kreizman takes readers on an intimate journey that revisits some of her most profound revelations, demonstrating that it’s never too late to become radicalized.

With Kreizman’s signature wit and blunt self-reflection, and more than a little transformative rage, I Want to Burn This Place Down is a book for anyone who wishes they could go back in time to give their younger selves the real truth about the fractured country they have inherited—and the encouragement to rebuild something better in its place.