This paper reports on preliminary findings for interactions between an AI creative writing coach and the end user. The project's objective is to examine the assistance of the creative writing process with generative artificial intelligence (GAI), through the deployment of a creative writing coach within Open AI's ChatGPT. Theoretically, the paper resides at the intersection of autoethnography, thing ethnography and enactivism Autoethnography, as a reflexive and personal approach to research, allows scholars to intertwine their own experiences with broader cultural and social issues. The advent of AI tools like ChatGPT introduces new dimensions to this process, offering both opportunities and challenges for creative writing within an autoethnographic framework. Thing ethnography presents an innovative methodology for examining non-human objects and systems, offering a fresh perspective on the evolving role of artificial intelligence (AI) in human creative practices. The incorporation of enactivism reflects the paper’s entanglement of the researcher with the qualitative data and research process. Through a detailed exploration of these intersections, this study examines how ChatGPT can be integrated into the creative writing process, enhancing or complicating the researcher’s narrative voice and reflexivity. Methodologically, this paper employs a layered autoethnographic approach, combining the author’s personal experiences with textual analysis of ChatGPT’s outputs during the writing process. Through the use of thing ethnography as a theoretical framework, the paper reveal a complex relationship between human creativity and AI assistance, highlighting issues of authorship, originality, and the ethical implications of using AI in creative practices. This study contributes to the ongoing discourse on the role of technology in ethnographic research and offers practical insights for researchers considering the use of AI in their own creative endeavours.

Keywords: AI, artificial intelligence, creative writing, coaching, personalised learning, creativity, teaching, creative writing.