Course Description
Long before the growing sophistication and ubiquity of artificial intelligence technologies and applications made them an urgent topic of contemporary concern, writers imagined--and readers encountered--a variety of artificial intelligences in poetry and fiction. This course will help students achieve a critical understanding of AI by exploring and interpreting it in relation to works of literature and to literary studies.
Athena Title
Literature and AI
Prerequisite
ENGL 1102 or ENGL 1102E or ENGL 1102S or ENGL 1103 or ENGL 1050H or ENGL 1060H
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student Learning Outcomes
- Students will be able to analyze representations of artificial intelligence in a variety of imaginative works.
- Students will be able to draw on those works in order to discuss the actual and potential roles, functions, practices, ethics, promises, and limitations of artificial intelligence technologies and applications in the contemporary world.
- Students will experiment with artificial intelligence technologies, e.g., for text and image generation, and will sharpen their critical thinking about the products and the use of AI in literature and in culture more broadly.
- Students will develop their abilities to think critically, argue persuasively, and write incisively.
- Students will have the opportunity to develop a collaborative digital project based on their work for the class.
Topical Outline
- Representations of artificial intelligence in speculative literature, from Mary Shelley to Ann Leckie and Ted Chiang
- Turing tests and imitation games: literary characters as artificial intelligences
- Lyric poetry and lyric subjects and/as artificial minds
- Large Language Models (LLMs) and the nature of language: twentieth-century literary theory and twenty-first-century computing practice
- What was an author? Ownership, authorship, and generated texts
- Instructions for imagining: AI, cognition, aesthetics
- Interactivity, text generation, and literary narrative
- Critical AI studies
- Sandboxing: the literary imagination and AI ethics
- Post humanities: artificial intelligence, human nature, cultural value
