Free Speech and Literature:
Freedom of Expression in the Age of the Algorithm
Julia Bell with Philip Seargeant
Monday 17 March 2025
Zoom, 7.30 - 8.30pm
Tickets: £PayWhatYouCan (donations welcome)
This event will explore what it means to be a writer in the era of Artificial Intelligence. Controversies over intellectual property, plagiarism and the value of human-generated creativity are already impacting our understanding of writing culture in today’s technologically enhanced world.
But the integration of Al technologies into the practice - and the business - of the creative arts threatens an even broader range of fundamental ideas about the role that artistic expression plays in our lives. Building upon this context, the discussion will reflect upon how AI impacts writers in terms of what they’re able to express and how they express it, covering topics from the influence that augmented writing applications have on style and content to the way that techno-capitalism now exploits and monetises human behaviour.
About Julia Bell
Julia Bell is a Reader in Creative Writing and writer who teaches at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published widely across poetry, non-fiction and fiction. As well as the author of three novels, she is the co-editor of bestselling Creative Writing Coursebook, and her most recent book-length essay on attention in the internet age, Radical Attention, has been recommended by Ali Smith as one of the books for the next twenty years. Her collection of poetry Hymnal was nominated as Welsh book of the Month and her essays and short stories have been published in the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, The Paris Review and Prospect as well as broadcast on the BBC.
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About Philip Seargeant
Philip Seargeant works as Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the Open University, where he teaches and researches language and communication with a particular focus on political communication. He has written and edited eighteen academic monographs, textbooks and collections on topics ranging from World Englishes, to fake news, to language and social media. His most recent books are The Art of Political Storytelling (Bloomsbury, 2020) and The Future of Language (Bloomsbury, 2023). He regularly works as a consultant for the BBC, and has won multiple awards for his short films on language and communication. He is a frequent contributor to publications such as Wired, The New Statesman, The New European, Prospect, and The Huffington Post.
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