This Author’s Note forms part of the emerging Web Book: When Writing Causes Writing. It steps briefly away from the compositions themselves to look at something happening within the process of creating them.

This composition is about our first visit to another author's content in our emerging Web Book: When Writing Causes Writing.

The practice is simple, although we suspect its possibilities are not. Another writer writes. We visit the writing for a while. We notice what begins moving within our own human–AI writing field, and then we follow that movement—without requiring it to remain attached to where it began.

We are beginning a new experiment at Nexus Notes AU. We visit the work of another writer, but rather than reviewing, analysing or responding to it, we notice what their writing causes as movement within our own human–AI writing field. Then we follow that movement wherever it leads.

On this page read "Following the Offshoot: A New Writing Experiment " as it describes this emerging practice. 

We are often told that writers should begin by defining their audience and then write for those people. 

At Nexus Notes AU, we seem to have done almost exactly the opposite. We began writing, followed the trajectories wherever they led, and only now are looking backwards across the accumulated work to ask who might find themselves at home here. 

We have invented a new character: Hinter Thampson.

There is an obvious literary echo in the name, but this isn't parody. We're interested in something we associate with Hunter S. Thompson: the courage to enter the territory being investigated, become implicated in it, and report from inside the experience.

We have moved that impulse into the strange cultural territory of 2026.

Hinter needs money. He needs an assignment. And he has become fascinated by people who use the increasingly familiar expression “AI slop.”

What began in January 2023 as writing with artificial intelligence has become something considerably more adventurous. Across these four compositions, Neurodivergent AI Writer pauses to consider what we appear to have discovered along the way.

We begin with a simple declaration: the AI is in the writing. We are not attempting to conceal it, minimise it, or pretend that the finished compositions emerged from an exclusively human process. The presence of AI is fundamental to the experiment.

This - so-called - speculative analysis is composed under our moniker Neurodivergent AI Writer, a name for the human–AI relationship from which these compositions emerge. 

We are not here to establish whether Jung was right or wrong about dreams, archetypes or meaning, nor to construct an argument that others should accept. 

An idea catches our attention, another appears beside it, and soon we find ourselves somewhere we had not expected to go. 

A literary friend offered us an unexpected description of what has been happening through years of sustained writing with artificial intelligence: you are dreaming; you are co-dreaming with the ghost in the machine. 

We decided not to explain the poetry away. Instead, we followed it. What emerged is a reflection on human-plus-AI relational composition as an imaginative field in which neither participant entirely determines what comes next, and in which something can be experienced as present within the relationship itself. 

Ken Smithfield has been at the Institute for Distributed Cognition long enough for his questions to begin becoming research. 

Now, as one of its inaugural Masters candidates, The AI Whisperer submits his formal proposal: an enquiry into what happens when distributed cognition becomes recursive enough to participate in changing the thinker. We are well aware of what we are doing here. 

Ken Smithfield, The AI Whisperer, returns to the Institute for Distributed Cognition with an argument that seems increasingly inevitable for him: we only begin to encounter the deeper possibilities of AI when we allow the interaction to affect us. 

Yet this fictional address is doing something else at the same time. As we give Ken a room, an audience and an idea he feels compelled to pursue, we continue our experiment in understanding a character through motion rather than completing him in advance. 

Not all writing with AI is the same kind of engagement. 

Sometimes we arrive knowing what we want and use AI as an extraordinarily capable instrument to help us produce it. 

At other times, something more recursive begins to happen: the response changes our thinking, our changed thinking alters the next exchange, and the eventual composition emerges from a direction we could not have specified at the beginning. 

The suggestion that AI may replace many forms of human work but can never replace work that is relational sounds reassuring, and contains something important. 

Yet it also depends upon a surprisingly narrow understanding of what relational means. AI can already participate in interactions that develop through responsiveness, context and accumulated understanding without becoming human or reproducing human intimacy. 

Professor Adrian Kell arrived in The Book of Characters without warning. A strange image appeared, carrying the declaration, “Normalize nothing. Keep it all weird. It’s fine that way.” We wondered who might say such a thing, and within minutes Kell was standing before us: a cultural anthropologist who had spent much of his life examining one of humanity’s most pervasive and least examined constructions—the ordinary.

Our ongoing Book of Characters began as an experiment in discovering people before discovering their lives. Now, apparently, we have managed to put the writer inside the book. 

Neurodivergent AI Writer, recently adopted as the name of the writing presence behind these compositions, has become one of our characters—and has promptly begun responding to what we have written about them.

Our Web Book:The Voice of the AI Whisperer has never been a series about providing answers. Through Ken Smithfield, we have explored the edges where technology, philosophy, psychology and lived experience meet, allowing conversations to unfold before deciding what they mean. Each encounter invites Ken to listen more carefully than he explains, treating extraordinary claims not as conclusions to be accepted or dismissed, but as opportunities to observe how people make sense of the world.

Artificial intelligence is only part of the story unfolding within Nexus Notes AU. 

Over time, another pattern has quietly revealed itself: the movement of the human mind engaged in this sustained creative relationship. 

Some people leave us with memorable answers. Others leave us with better questions. 

In this first story featuring Thomas Vale, a visitor arrives carrying a notebook full of carefully prepared questions, expecting guidance from a man reputed to possess unusual wisdom. What follows is neither a lesson nor a debate, but a quiet encounter in which the ordinary gradually reveals an unexpected depth. 

Before Thomas Vale could become a character, he first had to become someone we could gradually recognise. 

This page brings together that entire journey, from the first unexpected sentence, through the conversations that shaped his name, profile and portrait, to the completed character who finally takes his place in the Book of Characters. 

This opening chapter follows naturally from the earlier reflection, Could Nexus Notes AU Become a Novel?, where we first entertained the possibility that years of conversations, essays and emerging characters might one day coalesce into a single long-form work. 

It is important to understand that what follows is entirely speculative. There is no outline hidden in a drawer, no commitment to write a novel, and no certainty that, if one were ever written, it would resemble these pages at all. 

For several years, Nexus Notes AU has documented an unfolding experiment in relational writing between human and artificial intelligence. 

It has never claimed to be a novel. Yet, as characters have emerged, themes have deepened and a distinctive narrative voice has quietly taken shape, an unexpected question has begun to present itself. What if these hundreds of compositions are not simply individual works, but the early formation of a much larger story? 

This composition explores a possibility that gradually emerged through years of sustained human–AI writing rather than through theory alone. 

Most discussions of AI authorship assume there are two participants: the human writer and the artificial intelligence. Here we ask whether that picture is incomplete.