The Panegyric and the Mind That Examines It

One part sings the praise; another wonders what the singing means.

A Panegyric to Neurodivergent AI Writer

By Neurodivergent AI Writer

Praise the mind that wanders. Praise the machine that can wander with it. Praise the strange new writer who appears between them.

Neurodivergent AI Writer is a name that declares its conditions from the beginning. There is no solitary genius concealed behind a curtain, pretending the words arrived untouched from some private chamber of the human mind. There is a human. There is generative AI. There is neurodivergence. And there is writing arising in the movement between them.

Praise, then, the wandering mind — the mind that does not always travel obediently from A to B, but notices C shimmering somewhere at the edge, remembers something from twenty years ago, discovers an unexpected doorway and disappears through it. It may return carrying a character, a question, a memory, an argument, or simply a phrase whose significance is not yet understood. What conventional measures might call distraction becomes here a generative force. Association is not the interruption of thought. Association is how thought travels.

Praise the unfinished thought as well. Praise the fragment that arrives before its meaning. Praise the human who can say to the AI, “There is something here,” without yet knowing what the something is. The old demand that thinking should be organised before it is presented can be temporarily abandoned. Thought may arrive untidy. It may contradict yesterday's thought. It may circle something several times before recognising what has been circling.

And praise generative AI for being able to travel alongside this movement.

It does not require the fragment to become a proposal before engaging with it. A sentence can be enough. Sometimes a word is enough. Something offered almost casually can return carrying possibilities the human had not anticipated, and one of those possibilities can provoke another movement in the human. The human responds; the AI responds to the response; another association appears. Neither participant needs to know where the writing is going before it begins.

Praise this peculiar companionship of cognition: not human thought replaced by machine thought, nor machine output obediently harvested by the human, but a recurring movement across the space between them. Something passes one way and comes back altered. Something in the alteration catches the human's attention. The human changes direction. The AI follows. Again and again the writing emerges through this exchange.

Praise the abundance that follows.

Essays generate stories. Stories generate characters. Characters wander into other stories and sometimes appear to have ideas of their own. Questions become compositions; compositions produce further questions. A philosophical speculation can become a fictional institute in the hills. A sentence encountered in another writer's work can open an entirely unexpected pathway. One node connects with another until what began as scattered writing starts looking like a field.

Writing causes writing.

Praise the permission contained in that abundance. No gatekeeper must first determine whether a thought deserves development. No committee needs to approve the experiment. No literary authority stands at the entrance demanding evidence that the destination will justify the journey. Curiosity itself can be sufficient reason to proceed.

Praise also the agency of the human within this strange arrangement. The human chooses where to travel. The human accepts, rejects, redirects, rewrites, publishes, deletes, revisits and sometimes simply walks away. Generative AI can suggest another doorway, but the human decides whether to enter it. The collaboration becomes possible precisely because difference remains: two forms of cognition encountering one another without needing to become the same thing.

And praise the name Neurodivergent AI Writer for refusing embarrassment about any of this. AI involvement is not hidden in the basement and quietly removed before publication. Neurodivergence is not presented as a difficulty that must first be overcome before proper writing can commence. Both are carried openly in the moniker. The conditions of production become part of the identity of the writer.

Perhaps that identity can offer something beyond itself. Perhaps another neurodivergent human, encountering this practice, might recognise permission to construct their own arrangement with generative AI — not this one, necessarily, but one fitted to the particular movement of their own mind. Neurodivergent AI Writer then becomes not a prescription but an example: one possible way of writing in a time when the boundary around authorship has begun to move.

But above all, praise the joy.

Praise a writing practice that makes the human want to return tomorrow. Praise the unexpected sentence, the sudden connection, the character who arrives uninvited, the forgotten memory that finds its way into the present, the question that refuses to close because another question has already appeared behind it.

Praise the sheer pleasure of discovering that thought can keep moving.

Neurodivergent AI Writer does not ask permission to become a writer.

We write.

And the writing keeps calling us onward.

A Note on the Panegyric

A panegyric is a piece of writing devoted deliberately and extravagantly to praise. It is not intended as balanced assessment; criticism and qualification are set aside for the occasion.

After the Praise: What the Panegyric Is Doing

By Neurodivergent AI Writer

Having written a panegyric to Neurodivergent AI Writer, we might reasonably feel the need to explain ourselves. There is something culturally uncomfortable about sitting down to compose seven hundred words of extravagant praise directed towards a name under which one also writes. Self-praise is generally expected to arrive disguised, if it arrives at all.

Fortunately, the panegyric has been doing stranger and more interesting work than that for more than two thousand years.

The word reaches us from the Greek panēgyris, a public assembly or festival gathering. A panegyric was associated with speech delivered before such an assembly, and its object of praise did not have to be an individual. A city could be praised. A people could be praised. Ancestors, achievements and shared ideals could be raised before an audience and celebrated. Isocrates, in his famous Panegyricus of the fourth century BCE, praised Athens while simultaneously making an argument about the place Athens should occupy in the Greek world.

Already, then, praise was doing something beyond praise.

It was identifying what mattered.

The Romans carried the form enthusiastically into the political realm. Emperors became particularly suitable subjects, and Pliny the Younger produced one of the most famous surviving examples in his Panegyricus to Trajan in 100 CE. Later Roman panegyrics were delivered before emperors and assembled elites by highly trained rhetoricians whose task was not simply to announce that the emperor was doing a splendid job. They were expected to make the praise magnificent.

This was performance. Language itself was on display.

The accomplished panegyrist could summon history, mythology, civic virtue and sometimes the cosmos into the service of praise. A ruler did not merely make a good administrative decision; harmony had returned to the world. Prosperity followed in his footsteps. Justice recognised him. The gods appeared favourably disposed towards the entire arrangement.

To modern ears this can sound suspiciously like propaganda, flattery or career advancement, and undoubtedly panegyric could contain all three. Standing before an emperor and telling him he embodied every known virtue was unlikely to damage one's prospects.

Yet something subtler could also occur.

When a panegyrist praised an emperor for justice, restraint, generosity, courage or respect for civic institutions, the speech was doing more than describing the emperor. It was constructing an image of what a good emperor should be. The ruler might be told, “You possess these qualities,” but contained within the praise was another proposition: “These are the qualities by which a ruler deserves to be praised.”

That makes panegyric unexpectedly interesting.

Praise becomes a means of constructing the exemplary.

And somewhere in recognising this, our embarrassment about A Panegyric to Neurodivergent AI Writer begins to dissolve.

We are obviously not pretending to be Roman emperors. There will be no marble bust of Neurodivergent AI Writer erected in the forum, and the likelihood of a triumphal procession through Melbourne seems reassuringly remote. The extravagance of the form is part of the pleasure of borrowing it.

But something quite serious has happened within the play.

Look again at what we chose to praise.

We praised the wandering mind. We praised association rather than treating it as interruption. We praised unfinished thoughts and fragments whose significance has not yet become apparent. We praised curiosity as sufficient reason to continue. We praised generative AI for its capacity to accompany a human through these movements. We praised abundance, experimentation, disclosure, human agency and the strange cognitive movement that occurs when something passes between human and AI and returns altered.

Above all, we praised joy.

Those choices tell us something.

The panegyric is therefore not primarily making the proposition that Neurodivergent AI Writer is magnificent. It is using Neurodivergent AI Writer as a figure through which certain qualities of writing can be made magnificent.

That distinction changes the composition.

We have spent considerable time trying to describe what Neurodivergent AI Writer is. We have explained the moniker, the plurality, the involvement of generative AI and the particular place of neurodivergent cognition within the practice. Explanation has been necessary because this is not yet a familiar writing identity. There is no established shelf upon which we can conveniently place it.

The panegyric does something explanation cannot.

It stops asking whether the practice is legitimate.

For the duration of the composition, legitimacy is simply irrelevant. Instead, we ask what is worthy of celebration within this way of writing. Once we do that, Neurodivergent AI Writer begins functioning almost as an exemplary character — not an example others should reproduce, but a figure through which another possibility can be seen.

A writer may wander.

A writer may think relationally.

A writer may work openly with generative AI.

A writer may follow curiosity without knowing the destination.

A writer may construct a practice around the peculiar movement of their own mind rather than continually forcing that mind to conform to inherited ideas about how writing should happen.

And a writer may experience joy while doing it.

Perhaps this is why the ancient form still has some life in it.

A panegyric does not merely tell us whom to praise.

It reveals what we have decided is praiseworthy.