18th European Society for the Study of English Conference, University of Santiago de Compostela

Workshop #15 on Linguistic Creativity in the Age of Generative AI

This workshop aims to bring together linguists of all stripes (e.g. those interested in the study of English semantics, morphology, phraseology, syntax, or human and machine translation from/into English) who share an interest in the ways in which the recent advances in AI-enhanced language technology, such as LLM-powered chatbots and neural machine translation tools, are reshaping scholarly views of linguistic creativity. We distinguish between the process and product sides of creativity (see e.g. Runco 2024) and assume the existence of a cline between rule-based F(ixed)-creativity and rule-bending E(xtending)-creativity / X(travagant)-creativity (see e.g. Bergs 2019, Koliopoulou & Walker 2024), which leads us to narrow the workshop’s focus to linguistic products characterized by a distance from the pole of F-creativity — we take the concept of linguistic creative output to broadly encompass any innovation that is not strictly predictable from the rules of the linguistic system.

We invite empirical contributions on topics including (but not limited to) the following:

• linguistic analyses of AI-generated creative outputs, including their biases and other limitations;
• AI-based linguistic analyses of creative outputs, including their biases and other limitations;
• creativity ratings of AI-generated / hybrid (e.g. through post-editing) / human-generated outputs, in terms of originality and/or acceptability (including grammaticality judgments).

Papers may focus on a large variety of creative outputs, whether they are created from scratch, derived from previous creative work, or translated.