Toward a Shared Poetic: Human–AI Collaboration and the Making of Vanished Roads

Abstract Toward a Shared Poetic documents an extended creative collaboration between poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg and ChatGPT during the development of the haiku collection Vanished Roads. Rather than examining artificial intelligence solely as a tool for generating text, the essay explores the sustained editorial dialogue through which poems were revised, organized, contextualized, and documented over the course of approximately one year. Drawing upon an extensive conversational archive, the article examines questions of authorship, editorial practice, memory, documentation, and literary collaboration. It argues that the enduring significance of human-AI creative work may lie not only in the finished poems but also in the documented process by which they were produced. The essay presents this collaboration as a case study in the evolving relationship between human creativity and conversational artificial intelligence.