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Sympoietic creativity and the boundaries of qing: digital romance writers negotiating generative AI - AI & SOCIETY
This study investigates how writers of high-velocity Chinese digital romance fiction negotiate the arrival of generative AI at the desk. Drawing on a 4-year multi-sited digital ethnography (2021–2025) and interviews with 34 writers on Jinjiang Literature City alongside sustained forum observation and platform-discourse analysis, this article tracks how authors of serial romance work under the time discipline of the daily-update treadmill in the presence of large language models (LLMs). I argue that what is emerging is sympoietic creativity: a distributed practice of “making-with” the machine that is fraught, ambivalent and strategic rather than collaborative or replacement-driven. Four modes of negotiation co-exist across the cohort. In strategic collaboration, writers delegate world-building, naming and structural error-checking to the LLM. In cyborg authorship, they curate machine-generated prose under acute platform pressure, at the cost of what they themselves call the work’s “aura.” In conditional refusal, they hold the line at the inter-subjective texture of feeling they consider, on present evidence, beyond the model’s competence. In narrative incorporation, they thematize algorithmic logic in the fiction itself, casting the algorithmic system as villain and human emotion as the route to victory. Throughout, I reserve qing—the inter-subjective, somatic bond from which affect, desire, and embodiment become legible to the reader—as a precise analytical term distinct from generic English-language emotion or affect. The human zone these writers preserve is not a permanent or guaranteed space, but an unstable equilibrium sustained by reader vigilance, platform metrics, and writer self-discipline—any of which could withdraw.
