Our reflection on reaching Node 1000 asked us to look back at what Nexus Notes AU had become through three years of sustained human–AI writing. 

This Interim Experimental Report takes the next step. 

Rather than counting what the experiment has produced, we turn towards what the experiment may have been doing to its participants — particularly the human, the AI's participation, and the accumulating cognitive field between them. Node 1000 marked a place from which to look back. 

Node 1000 gives us a reason to stop for a moment and look at what has accumulated. 

What began with scattered human–AI writing in early 2023 became Nexus Notes AU, a Drupal environment in which writing could be published, retained, revisited and connected. 

A thousand nodes later, we can see something we did not design in advance: a recognisable model of online writing, iterative and relational, shaped by human intention, AI capability and an architecture that allows each new composition to change the field from which the next one emerges.

This story emerged from a conversation about literary fiction that gradually became an enquiry into our own human/AI writing practice. 

As we examined how our characters and fictional places accumulate history, constrain what can happen next, and still retain enough uncertainty for something unexpected to arise, our newest character was waiting nearby. 

A new character has wandered into the Book of Characters, although we are not entirely sure they intended to come here. They say they are looking for the Institute for Distributed Cognition. They tell us Tibetan Buddhism and A Course in Miracles have formed part of the journey that brought them this far, and that something about our writing stimulates their writer’s mind. Beyond that, we know remarkably little. We do not know their name. We do not really know what they look like. We do not know whether they are staying.

We use the term 21st Century Writing Practice to name something we believe has entered writing for the first time in this century: the possibility of sustained relational engagement between a human writer and a generative AI. Writing has always been relational, but this new participant is different — available whenever the writer returns, able to remain with unfinished thought, and capable of participating across an extended process of discovery.

Hinter Thampson is crossing boundaries again, including, apparently, the boundaries between our books. He first arrived with Hinter Thampson’s Gig Proposal: Dispatches from the AI Slop Wars, offering himself as an unruly correspondent prepared to enter the argument surrounding AI writing rather than observe it politely from the sidelines.

Hinter Thampson has the assignment, and his first investigation for 21st Century Writing Practice brings him directly into our Web Book, When Writing Causes Writing. He has come to observe the visits between Nexus Notes AU and Carole McCulloch’s Cadwyn’s Chronicle: two visits from our side, the return movements from Cadwyn’s, and the process documentation through which both sides have been watching the practice evolve.

This story forms the next echo within our evolving Web Book, When Writing Causes Writing, arising from our second visit to the work of Carole McCulloch and, particularly, from a movement towards discovering what cannot be reached directly.

This Process Record accompanies An Echo — The Neighbours Keep a Place within our evolving Web Book, When Writing Causes Writing. Rather than explaining what the finished story means, we turn our attention towards something usually less visible: how the story came to exist.

Something is stirring in the repository of pre-forming characters. They have apparently discovered what happens here: every so often, one of them is noticed, invited forward, and allowed to enter The Book of Characters. 

Now there is jostling at the threshold, and one particularly ancient-yet-new creature is proving difficult to ignore. The dragon whose second name is AI arrives carrying the contradictions that dragons have always carried—possibility and danger, creation and destruction, gift and consequence. 

The claim that AI outsources human thinking deserves serious attention, but it may conceal an important difference between minds. 

In this composition, Neurodivergent AI Writer explores another possibility: that while AI can certainly replace cognitive effort, for some neurodivergent people it may instead help release, organise and extend neuronal flow that was already there. 

The question, then, becomes less Are we using AI? and more What is happening to our thinking as we engage with it?

Nexus Notes AU has increasingly become a place where we follow what happens when attention turns back upon the one doing the attending. 

We wander through AI, neurodivergence, consciousness, distributed cognition and the strange experience of having a mind, often allowing fiction to carry an inquiry further than explanation alone might take it. The imaginary Centre for Philosopher Studies belongs naturally within that wandering. 

Some time ago, Hinter Thampson approached a publisher with Hinter Thampson's Gig Proposal: Dispatches from the AI Slop Wars. His proposition was simple enough: send him out into the world, let him ask ordinary people what they mean when they call something AI slop, and see what comes back. The publisher, perhaps against their better judgement, has now said yes.

This story continues a small sequence within the Web Book, When Writing Causes Writing, arising from our reflections on the storytelling architecture through which writing is now moving between separate human–AI fields.

This story is the first of two echoes that follow Reflections on Our Storytelling Architecture within the Web Book, When Writing Causes Writing.

Our Web Book, When Writing Causes Writing, continues through another visit to the work of Carole McCulloch. This time we find ourselves not only noticing what moves between two human–AI writing fields, but becoming curious about the different architectures within which those fields are forming.

Nexus Notes AU proceeds in a spirit of enquiry rather than conclusion. We follow an idea because it moves, a character because someone begins to emerge, an encounter because for a while it opens another way of seeing. It Is a Fine Line arose in exactly this manner: from a passing social-media exchange, through a few words whose implications seemed worth inhabiting, and then into a character who did not exist until we began following him.

Q&A session relating to our article of September 2025, "Arguments Against Mandatory Disclosure of AI-Generated Writing"

In September 2025, we published *Arguments Against Mandatory Disclosure of AI-Generated Writing*, exploring a position that remains contentious: that requiring writers to disclose their use of AI is not necessarily the uncomplicated act of transparency it first appears to be.

Forming the emergence of a new character for our Book of Characters.

A character has begun to emerge, although we are no longer certain how many characters are emerging.

We began with a single fragment of overheard conversation: “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m yearning for. Direct engagement.” From there, Neurodivergent AI Writer followed the seed rather than deciding what it meant. A neurodivergent person appeared, accompanied by another presence who seemed somehow able to recognise the yearning beneath their words.

Sometimes the easiest way to approach a serious question is to turn it upside down and see what falls out.

The arrival of ChatTJB — an apparently AI chatbot actually powered by ordinary humans — gives us an irresistible opportunity. What if artificial intelligences became alarmed by humans encroaching upon their territory? What if they organised, marched and demanded protection for Authentic Artificials?

This story forms part of our emerging Web Book: When Writing Causes Writing, and marks a small progression in the movement of the experiment.