MWC collaborated with Galvin Fine Arts at St. Ambrose University to organize a series of events, activities, and publications around the theme of "Being Human in the Age of AI" throughout the 2024-25 school year.
In the fall of 2024, we held a submission call for poems, stories, and essays from local writers around this theme. The submissions were read blindly by MWC Press who selected 22 works for inclusion in anthology, which our publishing imprint MWC Press published on April 16, 2025.
ANTHOLOGY CONTRIBUTORS
Asmita Bag | Mike Bayles | Ann Boaden | Leo Cardez | Adrian Cole | Melissa Conway | Allie Crisco | Raul DeLuna | Monica Flink | Philip Goldfarb Styrt | Gregory Gomez | Patous Gore | June Heller | Ava Miller | Sam Miller | Caitlin Moran | Emily Murphy | Kai Parker | Wendy Jean Saathoff | Emily Tobin | Garret Traylor | Esther Windt
This anthology is supported by the MWC Legacy Society, and the Illinois Arts Council.
EDITORS’ NOTE
Every single day we are confronted with hot takes and lukewarm support for whatever “AI” bot or Large Language Model is popular or controversial at the moment. It feels inescapable. As artists, it hurts our souls a little every time we see an artist’s watermark perverted in the results of someone’s request for an image generated to their specifications in under three seconds. We know this is also how these programs generate text—by corrupting the books, speeches, poems they’ve been fed. This is how they “learn.”
There are plenty of horror stories from folks in tech who have experienced the “AI” programs not shutting down or deleting when given those commands or having the programs respond
aggressively. Still, we’re advised that science has found incredible uses for “AI” programs that can help detect diseases and predict natural disasters. That has to be a good thing, right?
The problem we face is this: most of us are not using these tools to improve the world. Most of us are desperate for shortcuts or want to see what happens when we ask for wildly disparate ideas to be combined in a single image. Most of us are expending natural resources in an effort to not use our own internal resources.
We lose a little bit of our humanity every time we defer to a machine to think for us. The world we live in is hard and we deserve breaks. But our minds and hearts grow lazy and we lose the imagination and thought that once defined our species. The legacy these habits leave behind is that loss and the unfathomable damage to the earth that made us.
Reading through the submissions for the book you hold in your hands was uncomfortable, surprising, and heartening. Knowing that our Quad City community is creating—boldly, stubbornly, wildly—is perhaps the best gift this project could have produced.
When we asked what it means to be a human in the age of “AI,” you answered. You gave us hope for a technologically advanced future that opens possibility, not exploitation. You gave us humor and horror. You gave us heart. You showed us your
singular minds and your irreplaceable spirits. You gave us the source.
Whatever future we are walking into, we’re walking into it together: as artists, as survivors, as humans.
Ryan Collins & Sarah Elgatian
Rock Island, IL
March 2025
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Order a copy today using the link below. Contact us regarding bulk orders and/or discounts for book discussion groups, classrooms, etc. We are happy to offer schools, educators, and youth service programs price breaks: 309-732-7330