Capstone project proposal
Master of Creative Writing & Communication, Tabor Adelaide
Student: Lee Hopkins
Supervisor: Dr James Cooper
Date: March 2026
Project title
The Augmented Author: Writing with a brain that wasn’t designed for it
Project overview
This capstone proposes a practice-led research project that produces a sustained work of creative nonfiction (18,000–20,000 words) through transparent, documented AI collaboration, while simultaneously subjecting that collaboration to critical scholarly inquiry. The creative artefact and the critical exegesis are not parallel exercises. They are two registers of the same investigation into authorship, cognition, neurodivergence, and the changing nature of creative practice.
The creative piece examines what happens when a late-diagnosed neurodivergent author whose executive function makes sustained long-form writing physiologically expensive gains access to an AI tool that handles the mechanical production of prose while preserving intellectual, creative, and editorial control. It is memoir, cultural criticism, and psychology, written in a distinctive voice that blends clinical literacy with irreverent warmth, grounded in lived experience and supported by peer-reviewed research.
The AI collaboration will be documented at every stage. A full process log of prompts, drafts, editorial decisions, and reflective notes will accompany the creative artefact, providing primary research data for the critical exegesis.
Theoretical framework
The project draws on four intersecting bodies of literature:
Extended cognition and distributed mind. Clark and Chalmers’ extended mind thesis (1998) argues that external tools performing the same functional role as internal cognitive processes should be considered part of the cognitive system. For a neurodivergent writer, AI-assisted composition is a case of cognitive extension, not cognitive outsourcing. The human provides the ideation, the argument, the voice, the editorial control. The AI provides the mechanical sentence production that the human’s executive function cannot sustain. Clark’s later work in Supersizing the Mind (2008) and Murphy Paul’s popular synthesis The Extended Mind (2021) provide the accessible framework; Heersmink and Sutton (2021) extend it specifically to assistive technology in educational contexts.
Authorship theory. Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) and Foucault’s ‘What Is an Author?’ (1969) dismantled the Romantic model of the author as sole originary genius. AI co-writing extends this critique into genuinely new territory: the ‘author function’ now includes non-human agents, the text is produced by a distributed cognitive system, and the question of intentionality (central to Chiang’s argument against AI art) becomes productively complicated. Burke’s The Death and Return of the Author (1998) tracks how the authorial subject kept returning even as its death was being declared, which is precisely what AI co-writing does: it forces authorship back into the conversation in ways that make the solitary-genius model look quaint.
Neurodivergence, burnout, and access. Raymaker et al.’s (2020) definition of autistic burnout provides the clinical framework for understanding why sustained long-form writing is physiologically expensive for ADHD brains. The project positions AI-assisted writing not as a shortcut but as an access technology, consistent with the social model of disability, which locates the barrier in the environment rather than the individual.
AI and creative practice (emerging empirical literature). Doshi and Hauser’s (2024) finding that AI improves individual creativity while reducing collective diversity provides the key empirical tension. Gong et al.’s (2025) From Pen to Prompt study documents how experienced writers develop intentional AI workflows that preserve creative values. This project contributes a documented, longitudinal case study from a neurodivergent practitioner working in long-form nonfiction.
Research questions
1. How does a neurodivergent author maintain creative control, distinctive voice, and editorial authority when working with AI as a cognitive collaborator in long-form creative nonfiction?
2. What does transparent AI co-writing reveal about the assumptions embedded in inherited models of authorship, particularly the Romantic model of the solitary genius?
3. How should creative writing pedagogy and assessment adapt to a reality in which AI-assisted composition is not an aberration but an emerging mode of practice, especially for writers whose neurology makes unassisted sustained composition costly?
4. What are the ethical, institutional, and disciplinary implications of AI co-writing for practice-led creative research?
Methodology
Practice-led research as defined by Kroll and Harper (2013) and Arnold (2007). The creative practice generates the research questions; the research informs the ongoing creative practice; the exegesis examines both. The AI collaboration is both method and subject.
Data sources include the creative artefact itself; a maintained process log of all human-AI interactions, including prompts, drafts, editorial decisions, and discarded material; reflective journal entries documenting the author’s experience of the collaborative process; and the existing body of published work that demonstrates the author’s voice and practice both before and during AI collaboration.
Relationship to Tabor’s AI Use in Assessment Guide
The project sits most naturally at Level 4 (‘AI Partial Task Completion & Full Human Evaluation’), where AI-generated content is permitted in specified parts and the student critically evaluates the AI’s use and effectiveness across the entire assessment. The specified part is first-draft prose production; the human evaluation is the editorial, structural, and voice work that transforms that draft into the final artefact. The critical evaluation is not a bolted-on appendix but the full scholarly apparatus of the exegesis.
Full documentation of AI tools, prompts, and interaction logs will be submitted alongside the creative artefact and exegesis, consistent with the Guide’s requirements for transparency and declaration of use.
Assessment mapping
HSW117.9 Major Creative Project (Part A & B): The creative artefact of 18,000–20,000 words, plus workshop presentations demonstrating work in progress, response to feedback, and the evolution of the human-AI collaborative process.
HSW115.9 Writer as Researcher: An annotated bibliography of key readings across the four theoretical domains (extended cognition, authorship theory, neurodivergence, AI and creative practice), followed by a 5,000-word critical exegesis examining the creative artefact through the lens of practice-led research methodology.
HSW116.9 Professional Portfolio: Professional development plan, portfolio, CV, and pitch/proposal for the completed work, drawing on the author’s existing publishing platform (40+ published books via Amazon KDP and Draft2Digital, Substack at quiethalf.com, and multiple professional websites).
Author’s qualifications and context
I hold a B.Sc. (Hons.) in Applied Psychology and Sociology, a Diploma of Management Studies, and a Master’s in Counselling Practice specialising in depression and bipolar disorder among veterans. I have 450+ academic citations in organisational psychology. I have published more than 40 books, including creative nonfiction, psychology self-help, and social commentary. I am a late-diagnosed AuDHD adult (diagnosed at 66) who relocated from Australia to Việt Nam eleven months ago. My most recent book, Understanding AuDHD (4th edition), was a 53,000-word collaboration with Claude (Anthropic) and includes a full Author’s Note disclosing the AI collaboration in the first pages.
This project is not a thought experiment. It is a formalisation of a practice I am already conducting transparently, productively, and at scale.
Works cited
Arnold, Josie. Practice Led Research: A Dynamic Way to Knowledge. Rock View Press, 2007.
Barthes, Roland. ‘The Death of the Author.’ Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, Fontana Press, 1977, pp. 142–48.
Burke, Seán. The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. 3rd ed., Edinburgh UP, 2008.
Chiang, Ted. ‘ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web.’ The New Yorker, 9 Feb. 2023.
Chiang, Ted. ‘Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art.’ The New Yorker, 31 Aug. 2024.
Clark, Andy. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford UP, 2003.
Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford UP, 2008.
Clark, Andy, and David J. Chalmers. ‘The Extended Mind.’ Analysis, vol. 58, no. 1, 1998, pp. 7–19.
Doshi, Anil R., and Oliver P. Hauser. ‘Generative AI Enhances Individual Creativity but Reduces the Collective Diversity of Novel Content.’ Science Advances, vol. 10, no. 28, 2024, eadn5290.
Foucault, Michel. ‘What Is an Author?’ Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, translated by Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Cornell UP, 1977, pp. 113–38.
Gong, Evey, et al. ‘From Pen to Prompt: How Creative Writers Integrate AI into Their Writing Practice.’ Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Creativity and Cognition, ACM, 2025.
Heersmink, Richard, and John Sutton. ‘Extended Cognition, Assistive Technology and Education.’ Synthese, vol. 199, 2021, pp. 14727–49.
Kroll, Jeri, and Graeme Harper, editors. Research Methods in Creative Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Murphy Paul, Annie. The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021.
Perkins, Mike, et al. ‘The AI Assessment Scale (AIAS): A Framework for Ethical Integration of Generative AI in Educational Assessment.’ Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice, 2024.
Raymaker, Dora M., et al. ‘“Having All of Your Internal Resources Exhausted Beyond Measure and Being Left with No Clean-Up Crew”: Defining Autistic Burnout.’ Autism in Adulthood, vol. 2, no. 2, 2020, pp. 132–43.