Mark Twain House sets November symposium on writing in the age of AI

The Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford will hold a public symposium on Nov. 7 examining how generative artificial intelligence is reshaping creative writing, from copyright and training data to classroom practice and readers’ ability to identify human work. “Creative Writing in the Age of AI” will run from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the museum’s Farmington Avenue site, with both in-person and livestream registration available. The museum said discounted in-person tickets will be offered to educators and students. The day will bring together writers, editors, scholars, journalists and educators, with John Warner moderating. Participants include David Baldacci, Lydia Millet, Ron Charles and Jane Rosenzweig, alongside academics working across philosophy, law and technology. The program is divided into conversations on “Frameworks,” “Authors & Editors,” and “Teaching, Learning, & Reading,” before a final roundtable, “What Now? What Next?” The first will consider intellectual property, copyright, AI training data and public understanding of the technology; the second will focus on creative labor as systems trained on writers’ and publishers’ work generate material at scale. The education and reading session will address book criticism, pleasure reading, writing pedagogy and the use of student and teacher data to train AI systems. Across the day, speakers are also set to consider how schools can help students develop their own voices when AI can produce a draft quickly, and what readers value in stories written by people. Those questions sit within an active federal policy debate. The U.S. Copyright Office began its AI inquiry in early 2023, covering both copyright in AI-generated works and the use of copyrighted material in training. Its August 2023 notice of inquiry drew more than 10,000 comments, and the office subsequently issued reports on digital replicas and the copyrightability of generative-AI outputs, followed by a pre-publication version of a third installment in May 2025. The Hartford program follows an AI-themed fall lineup at SUNY Oswego’s Living Writers Series, as covered in August. The symposium forms the second day of a two-day museum literature celebration. On Nov. 6, the museum will give Millet the 2026 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award for “Atavists,” her collection of interconnected short stories. The award, established in 2016 with sponsorship from David and Michelle Baldacci, marks its 10th year and carries a $25,000 prize for fiction published in the preceding calendar year that speaks in an American voice about American experiences.