Sympoietic creativity and the boundaries of qing: digital romance writers negotiating generative AI

Abstract 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.