Literature vs. AI

Undergraduate / Graduate

Was this written by a human? So what? As we enter the so-called "age of AI," we find ourselves asking questions like this, perhaps more than ever before. This course explores how works of fiction and film from the late nineteenth century to the present have engaged with and anticipated ideas about art, mindedness, emotion, and agency at the heart of contemporary debates about the cultural impact of generative AI. If generative AI poses a challenge to literature and art, what is this challenge? What are literature and art that AI-generated text and images are not? Moving from modernist explorations of automatic writing and the unconscious to sci-fi speculations about robots and mind uploading, we'll analyze how literature has reflected on what sets its meaning apart from the products of machines, and what sets its artistry apart from mere algorithms and marketing. Readings in literary and critical theory will attune us to the relationship between abstract questions like "what is meaning?" and historical processes like capitalist automation-machines replacing human labor for profit. Our readings and screenings may include a Kazuo Ishiguro novel; the prescient short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, Roald Dahl, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry James; modernist poetry by Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and André Breton; science fiction tales by Ted Chiang, Philip K. Dick, and William Gibson; and recent films by Spike Jonze and Bertrand Bonello. (Fiction, Theory, 1830-1990, 20th/21st)