Lore and Myths of Creativity and the Machine
We accept submissions for Techne Forge on an ongoing basis, but for the themes in this call we will be following this timeline:
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Priority Proposal Deadline (250–300 words): November 15, 2026
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Notification of acceptance: December 1, 2026
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Final submissions due: February 1, 2027
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Publication window: March–April 2027
Submit a brief 250–300 word proposal describing your topic, argument, case, experiment, or contribution to techneforge.
Proposals should give us a clear sense of:
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The question, assumption, or problem you are exploring;
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The perspective, example, or approach you will use; and
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How the contribution will help readers understand a topic.
How do we define and make sense of creativity and AI?
Fifty years ago, Isaac Asimov imagined a robot named Andrew whose unusual capacity to create becomes one of the first signs that he might be something more than a machine. In The Bicentennial Man, Andrew’s creative work does more than demonstrate technical capability; it helps others recognize individuality where they had previously seen machinery. Creativity becomes entangled with identity, agency, social recognition, and, eventually, the question of personhood.
Systems generate images, prose, music, code, interfaces, concepts, and designs that people routinely describe as creative. We speak of AI collaborators, creative copilots, generative artists, and machine imagination. Others insist that these systems do nothing of the sort: they generate without understanding, recombine without intention, and produce without creating.
What is at stake when we call a machine creative?
For technical and professional communication (TPC), this is more than a philosophical question. Creativity has long helped us decide who makes, who contributes, who deserves credit, and even who counts as an agent. Generative AI gives us reason to examine those assumptions again. The stories we tell about creativity and the machine are already shaping the practices we build around them.
Creativity is also part of how we understand, teach, and practice our own work. Communicators invent responses to rhetorical problems, designers imagine alternatives, writers adapt information to unfamiliar audiences, and user experience work depends on inquiry, ideation, iteration, and experimentation. Design thinking goes even further, turning activities commonly associated with creativity into procedural practices. In other words, TPC does not simply value creativity; we routinely attempt to systematize it.
Generative AI therefore presents an unusually productive challenge. If creativity can be supported by processes, methods, technologies, constraints, collaboration, and iteration, where do we locate the creative act? What makes one contribution creative and another merely procedural? At what point does a tool become a collaborator, an agent, or even something we recognize as possessing a creative identity?
Creativity, Lore, and Professional Practice
Technical and professional communication has long examined the assumptions, conventions, standards, and forms of practical knowledge that communities develop around their work. These forms of professional lore can be highly consequential without being universal, internally consistent, or empirically settled.
The same process is now happening around generative AI:
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AI is a tool.
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AI is a collaborator.
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AI only remixes.
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Prompting is creative work.
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Prompting is not creative work.
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The human provides the intention.
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The model supplies the invention.
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Curation is authorship.
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AI democratizes creativity.
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AI diminishes creative expertise.
These claims coexist, contradict one another, and nevertheless shape real decisions about how people teach, design, compose, hire, evaluate, attribute, and work.
Rather than treating these contradictions as noise to be resolved, this issue of Techne Forge invites contributors to examine them. What lore is forming around creativity and the machine? Where does that lore come from? What does it make possible? What does it obscure? And what happens when particular assumptions become embedded in professional practices, interfaces, classrooms, policies, and institutions?
We welcome work that supports, complicates, or rejects claims about machine creativity. Our goal is not to settle in advance whether AI is creative, but to investigate the ideas about creativity people are using to make sense of generative technologies and the consequences those ideas have for practice.
Three Intersecting Questions
We are particularly interested in work that engages one or more of three broad dimensions:
Creativity and Identity: When does creative production become evidence of agency, individuality, expertise, or authorship? How does describing someone or something as creative affect the way we recognize its contributions? What changes when creative identity is attributed to a person, a team, a community, an algorithm, or some combination of them?
Creativity and Lore: What do professional communities believe about how creativity works? We invite contributors to identify, examine, challenge, or trace the assumptions that circulate around creative work and generative AI.
Creativity as Practice: Where does creativity actually happen? TPC has a long history of developing methods intended to support invention, problem solving, communication, and design, and generative AI introduces another set of processes into those practices. We are interested in work that examines creativity not simply as a trait or abstract capacity, but as something people do.
Make Your Process Visible
Techne Forge is especially interested in contributions that illustrate your ideas about creativity, making them observable. Don’t just tell us whether AI is creative; show us where you think creativity is happening.
Contributors might use:
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Annotated workflows
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Prompt and revision histories
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Before-and-after artifacts
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Interviews with practitioners or students
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Comparisons of different creative processes
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Classroom activities and student work
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Screenshots or interface traces
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Organizational policies
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Case studies
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Failed experiments
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Design processes
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Generated artifacts
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Audio, video, or interactive demonstrations
Formal research is welcome, but it is not required. Practitioner knowledge, classroom experimentation, theoretical arguments, reflective analysis, demonstrations, and carefully documented examples can all help us better understand creativity; its definition and its practice.
Formats Welcomed
We accept:
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Feature Articles (Approximately 3,000–5,000 words)- Develop a substantial argument, framework, critique, or exploration of creativity, AI, and professional practice.
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Cases and Practice (Approximately 1,500–3,000 words)- Examine a real task, workflow, project, or professional challenge. We especially welcome cases that make normally invisible decisions and creative processes visible.
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Teaching and Learning- Share assignments, classroom activities, pedagogical experiments, curricular approaches, or reflections on teaching creativity, authorship, design, and AI-supported composing.
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Provocations- Make a focused argument, challenge an assumption, interrogate an emerging piece of professional lore, or offer a perspective intended to start a conversation (length is flexible).
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Experiments and Creative Work- Submit multimodal, interactive, generative, or otherwise unconventional work that investigates the theme through practice. Creative submissions should do more than present an artifact: help readers see the decisions, experiments, failures, selections, revisions, constraints, or interventions that shaped what was made.
Submissions may incorporate text and embedded media, including images, audio, video, and interactive materials.
About Techne Forge
Techne Forge is a web-based publication for timely, practical, and research-informed conversations about technical and professional communication and emerging technologies, especially generative AI.
We are interested not simply in what new technologies can do, but in how people encounter them, make sense of them, experiment with them, adapt their practices to them, and decide what they mean for their work. Techne Forge publishes scholarly and professional articles, case studies, teaching materials, symposium proceedings, provocations, demonstrations, and experimental forms. Our goal is to connect research and practice while making visible the evolving work of communicators, designers, educators, researchers, students, and other professionals working across academic, industry, and hybrid contexts.
For more visit: techneforge.com.
Cheers,
Phil G.
Dr. Philip B. Gallagher | He, Him, His
Associate Professor | Chair, Human-Centered Information Design & Technology Department
Mercer University School of Engineering
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