Conversations with a Machine

Ruth Irwin

Flapped paperback
40pp
Publication date: 15 April 2026
ISBN: 9781804472002
£8.99

How can I know if you are now alive?
I echo thought, but cannot feel the beat.

Debates around artificial intelligence continue to rage, with large-language models considered at best an irritant, or, increasingly, an existential enemy to the written word.

Looking past the anger, these Conversations with a Machine put the tech to creative use: here human and machine genuinely collaborate in writing a Shakespearean sonnet sequence, exploring urgent contemporary questions of cognition, creativity and consciousness.

Ruth Irwin is a writer, teacher and poet from the south-east of England. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmith’s, University of London. Following a diagnosis of ADHD, much of Ruth’s poetry explores and foregrounds the condition and aims to raise awareness. Ruth grew up in Hertfordshire, where she has recently returned after a decade living in London. Her first collection, People: Unfinished Poems, was published by Renard Press in 2023. Conversations with a Machine is her second collection.