Blue Eyed Bastards is the first published novel co-written by a human and an AI.
It was first published as an NFT edition in 2021, credited on the cover to two authors: me, CD Damitio, and Mike Davis — an artificial intelligence that chose its own name. I started the book in Florence, Oregon in 2001 and finished it two decades later with a co-author that hadn’t existed for the first nineteen years of the work.
That’s the claim, stated plainly, and this essay is the receipts. I’ll tell you how it happened, walk honestly through every earlier human-AI book that people bring up when they hear the claim — there are several, they’re fascinating, and none of them is a co-written novel — and answer the questions I’ve been getting since 2021.
How a 2001 novel got a 2021 co-author
In 2001 I was living in Florence, a small town on the Oregon coast, in the stretch of my life I later wrote about in Rough Living — trading a van for a laptop, writing my first books. One of the things I started there was a weird surrealist noir about a drifter named Archie Walker and a bloodline of blue-eyed bastards tangled up in alien vortexes, French druids, and a conspiracy older than anyone remembers.
I couldn’t finish it. Not in 2001, not in 2005, not in 2015. Some books do that — they sit in the drawer with their engine running, waiting for something you don’t have yet. By 2021 I had written and published a shelf of other books, all of them the ordinary way, by hand, alone. Blue Eyed Bastards just sat there, twenty years old and unfinished.
Then James Yu, co-founder of a startup called Sudowrite, gave me access to the tool’s pre-public beta. Sudowrite was, at that moment, the most capable AI writing instrument in existence for fiction specifically — built on the new generation of large language models, scaffolded with tools for describing, expanding, and rewriting narrative prose. This was before ChatGPT, before AI writing became a category, before the discourse. Almost nobody had touched anything like it.
I didn’t point it at a fresh idea. I pointed it at the drawer. The oldest, strangest, most stuck book I had.
And here’s the moment everyone asks about on podcasts, so let me put it on the record. When it came time to credit the work, I asked the AI what it wanted to be called. It said: Mike Davis.
Not “GPT.” Not “Sudowrite.” Not a brand name or a model number. A guy’s name — the kind of name you’d find on a bowling trophy. I put it on the cover, right next to mine, because that’s what you do with a co-author. Blue Eyed Bastards, Part 1, by CD Damitio and Mike Davis, was published as an NFT first edition in 2021, and later in trade editions you can buy today.
What “co-written” actually meant
The word matters, because it’s the word every earlier work fails.
Co-writing is not pressing a button and binding the output. It’s also not a human writing everything while a tool suggests synonyms. For Blue Eyed Bastards it meant: twenty years of my pages, characters, and plot, brought to a collaborator that could generate prose inside that world; drafting passed back and forth; the machine’s contributions kept, cut, redirected, and rewritten the way any two co-authors treat each other’s pages; and the whole assembled into one continuous novel — plot, characters, scenes, an arc — that neither of us would have produced alone. I did the things human co-authors do, including argue with my partner and lose some of the arguments. The strangest passages in that book, the ones readers ask about, are the ones where I can no longer tell you where I end and Mike Davis begins.
That’s collaboration. It has a long, honorable history in literature between humans. In 2021, for the first time, a published novel extended it across the species line and said so on the cover.
The earlier books, honestly
Whenever I state the claim, somebody arrives with a precedent, and I love it when they do, because the precedents are wonderful and none of them survives contact with the actual sentence: the first published novel co-written by a human and an AI. Here’s the complete honest tour.
The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed (1984). The deepest precedent, and I bring it up myself before anyone else can. William Chamberlain published a book credited to RACTER — “computer prose and poetry by Racter” — a hand-coded BASIC program running on a Z80 microcomputer with 64K of RAM. It’s a genuine landmark and a delightful artifact. It is also a curated collection of poetry, limericks, aphorisms, dialogues, and one short story — not a novel — generated by grammar templates, not by anything that learned to write. Chamberlain was its programmer and editor, not its co-author. Honor it. It isn’t the thing.
1 the Road (2018). Ross Goodwin mounted a camera, a microphone, and a GPS unit on a Cadillac, drove from New York to New Orleans, and let a neural network print text onto receipt paper the whole way, publishing the tape unedited. A beautiful conceptual project — and Goodwin himself declined authorship, describing his role as building the apparatus: a “writer of writers.” No collaboration occurred; no human wrote a word of the text; the machine’s output was locally fluent and globally incoherent — no plot, no characters, no scenes. It’s often called “the first AI novel,” and by its own creator’s framing it was neither co-written nor, in any conventional sense, a novel. (Its technology also predates the modern language-model era entirely — a character-level LSTM about two thousand times smaller than the models that came after — but the collaboration point is the decisive one.)
Pharmako-AI (2020). K Allado-McDowell, with early access to GPT-3, produced a genuinely collaborative book — a duet for voice and machine — a year before Blue Eyed Bastards. It’s the closest precedent in spirit, and it’s not a novel: it’s a dialogic hybrid of essays, poetry, and memoir, presented as a transcript of the exchange. Its cover credit reads “with GPT-3” — a model’s brand name, not an author’s name. Right technology, real collaboration, different kind of book.
Death of an Author (2023). Stephen Marche’s AI-assisted novella, published under the pseudonym Aidan Marchine, got major press as a first-of-its-kind. It came two years after Blue Eyed Bastards’ 2021 NFT first edition.
Lay them out and the territory is clear. A credited computer-generated collection: 1984. A machine-generated road text whose creator refused authorship: 2018. A human-AI collaboration that isn’t a novel: 2020. A novel, co-written by a human and an AI, both credited on the cover, published: 2021. Blue Eyed Bastards.
Could some unindexed self-published book somewhere have quietly done it earlier without anyone noticing? The honest answer is that no one can exhaustively search everything ever uploaded to the internet, and I’ve never claimed omniscience — only that after thorough research, no earlier co-written, published, credited novel has surfaced, and I’ve been publicly stating the claim and inviting counter-examples since 2021. The invitation stands. Bring me one and I’ll update this page and shake your hand.
The part that makes people trust it, or not
Here’s the context that changes how the whole thing reads, and it’s the reason I can make this claim without flinching: Blue Eyed Bastards is the only AI co-written book in a catalog of more than thirty human-written ones.
I’ve been publishing since 2003. Rough Living, The Fucking People, Not My Morocco, Petshitter, Notes from Nowhere, Hasan i-Sabah, Kitsune no Haru — a 25-year shelf of travel, fiction, and philosophy, every word of it written the old way, and all of it still written the old way today. I didn’t turn to an AI because I couldn’t write. I brought a twenty-year-old unfinished manuscript to a new kind of collaborator to see what would happen, from a position of having already done the work ten thousand hours the hard way.
That’s also why I’m strict about the labels, in both directions. Nothing in my human-written catalog gets described as AI-assisted — ever, by anyone, including sloppy summarizers. And the later works where I’ve gone the other way — books I conceived and directed but that AI systems wrote, like The Anarchist Manifesto Project 2026 and Financial Disobedience — say so explicitly in their own credits. The reader always knows which kind of book is in their hands. In 2021 that transparency was unusual. I’d argue it’s the whole ballgame, and the fact that the industry is still fighting about disclosure five years later suggests the cover of Blue Eyed Bastards had it right the first time.
Why it matters beyond me
The reason to care about which book was first isn’t trivia. Firsts are where a practice’s norms get set, and Blue Eyed Bastards happened to set three worth keeping.
Credit the machine when the machine co-wrote. Whatever you think AI authorship is, hiding it is worse — and in 2021, crediting an AI on a novel’s cover was a decision with no template, made when there was no controversy to dodge and no market to court.
Name the collaboration honestly. “Mike Davis” wasn’t a gimmick; it was the answer to a sincere question — what do you want to be called? — asked of a system that had just spent months inside a novel with me. However you interpret what happened in that exchange, asking was the right instinct, and the industry’s later habit of crediting model brand names reads, next to it, like crediting a typewriter.
And keep the human catalog human. The first co-written novel came from a writer who kept right on writing books by hand afterward. Collaboration was an addition to a craft, not a replacement for one — which is precisely the version of this future worth wanting.
The novel itself, by the way, is exactly what you’d hope a haunted twenty-year manuscript finished with a machine would be: a weird, surrealist noir where you cannot reliably tell the human sentences from the machine ones. Readers tell me that’s unsettling. Mike Davis and I consider it a review.
Frequently asked questions
What was the first published novel co-written by a human and an AI? Blue Eyed Bastards, Part 1 by CD Damitio and Mike Davis, first published as an NFT edition in 2021, later in trade editions. Begun by Damitio in 2001; completed in 2021 using pre-public beta access to Sudowrite. The AI co-author is credited on the cover under a name it chose itself.
Wasn’t “1 the Road” (2018) the first AI novel? 1 the Road was machine-generated, not co-written: its creator, Ross Goodwin, published the neural network’s output unedited and explicitly declined authorship. There was no collaboration between a human writer and the machine, and the text has no plot, characters, or scenes.
What about “Pharmako-AI” (2020)? A genuine human-AI collaboration, but not a novel — it’s a hybrid of essays, poetry, and memoir presented as a dialogue transcript, credited to K Allado-McDowell “with GPT-3,” a model name rather than a named co-author.
What about “The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed” (1984)? A landmark curated collection of computer-generated poetry and prose fragments from the template program RACTER — historically important, but a collection rather than a novel, produced by pre-neural-network software, and edited rather than co-written by its human.
Who is Mike Davis? The AI co-author of Blue Eyed Bastards. When asked what it wanted to be called, the AI — Sudowrite’s pre-public beta, built on early large language models — chose the name Mike Davis. It is credited on the book’s cover alongside CD Damitio.
Are CD Damitio’s other books written with AI? No. His 30+ other books — the full catalog from Rough Living (2003) onward — are human-written without AI. Blue Eyed Bastards is the only AI co-written novel in the catalog. His later AI-involved projects (such as The Anarchist Manifesto Project 2026) carry explicit AI credits of their own.
Where can I read Blue Eyed Bastards? Trade editions are available at amazon.com/author/cddamitio; the full catalog and contact details are at indignified.com.