In this solo episode of Talking Tech with Creatives, Stella Oni steps back from her guest conversations to ask a question that increasingly sits at the heart of the creative industries:
As technology becomes more capable, where does the human sit in the creative process?
From music and entrepreneurship to publishing, podcasting and professional work, technology is making it possible to create, produce and distribute work faster than ever. But greater access also brings new questions about originality, discoverability, authenticity, ownership and creative rights.
Stella looks at the writing world and recent controversies surrounding alleged generative-AI use in publishing. She asks: How should publishers establish whether a work is human-authored? How reliable are accusations of AI use? And could some writers and writing voices face greater suspicion than others?
The episode also explores the work being done by organisations including the Society of Authors, ALCS, the Authors Guild and the Alliance of Independent Authors, and why Stella believes consent, licensing and compensation must remain central to the conversation about AI and creative work.
She also reflects on her own boundaries as a novelist, technical writer, lecturer, speaker and podcaster — and why the difficult, imperfect process of creating fiction herself remains something she wants to protect.
Plus, there are updates from Stella’s writing world, the Lara’s Detective Agency stories, the Toks Ade Mystery series and her University of Cambridge PACE crime-writing course.
The question isn’t simply what technology can do. It is what we want technology to do — and who we choose to be alongside it.