The Routledge Handbook of AI and Literature

by Will Slocombe (Editor), Genevieve Liveley (Editor)

Overview

The Routledge Handbook of AI and Literature provides an invaluable resource for those interested in deepening their understanding of the variety of theories and approaches available when AI is studied or deployed in literary contexts. It also illustrates ways in which AI researchers can use literary lenses to better understand the sociotechnical dynamics and cultural imaginaries shaping human interactions with AI.

Both AI and literature are understood in their broadest senses here. The book incorporates chapters that deal with Large Language Models, Generative AI, transformer architectures, story generators, and computational analysis. Literary case studies embrace performance, poetry, comics, as well as prose, and span a wide range of historical periods, from the ancient world to contemporary science fiction and Generative AI poetry.

The Handbook brings together early career contributors, as well as some of the best-known names in the digital humanities and computational literary studies. It offers a fresh perspective on the past, present, and future of AI and literature that will appeal to students and scholars with relevant interests across a range of subjects, including AI Engineering, Classics, Computing, Digital Humanities, English, Ethics, Film and Television, Law, and Narratology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032186948
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/30/2024
Series:	Routledge Literature Handbooks
Pages:	396
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Will Slocombe is Reader in English and Co-Director of the Olaf Stapledon Centre for Speculative Futures at the University of Liverpool, UK. His research interests embrace various areas of 20th- and 21st-century literature, with a primary focus on science fiction representations of Artificial Intelligence, representations of technology and technological development, postmodernism, and metafictions and experimental literature.

Genevieve Liveley is Professor of Classics and Turing Fellow at the University of Bristol, UK. She is the author of Narratology (2019) and various chapters, articles, and books on AI, robots, and cyborgs – both ancient and modern. As a narratologist, she has particular research interests in stories and their impact on futures thinking – especially in the context of emerging technologies, AI, and cyber security.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1.     Why AI and literature?

Will Slocombe and Genevieve Liveley

 

Section 1: AI Authors

2.     The author, poor bastard: writing, creativity, AI 

Caroline Basset

 

3.     Does writing have a future? 

David J. Gunkel

 

4.     A brief history of computer-generated literature: in search of the author  

Tuuli Hongisto 

 

5.     Emerging models of AI ‘authorship’ in popular discourse

Sara Bimo

 

Section 2: AI Voices

6.     Oracle, echo, or stochastic parrot? who (or what) speaks in AI-generated literature? 

Siebe Bluijs

 

7.     Free spaces of imaginal adventure: voicing silence in AI and literature

Genevieve Liveley and Natalie J. Swain

 

8.     The AI question, or what if Homer had ChatGPT? 

Richard Cole

 

9.     The voice of the platform  

Laura Piippo

 

Section 3: AI Interrogations

10. There has never been an intelligent literature

Michael Marcinkowski 

 

11. Shakespeare didn’t brainstorm: Why literature proves that there’s more to intelligence than AI 

Angus Fletcher

 

12. A token effort? Reflections on the authoring of (science) fiction in an age of ‘artificial intelligence’

Paul Graham Raven

 

Section 4: AI Narratives

13. AIs reading AI narratives?

Will Slocombe

 

14. AI 2041: critical design fiction? 

Jo Lindsay Walton

 

15. Digital, deep fake and glitch twins in the cultural imaginaries of generative AI

Edward King

 

16. The rise of the artificial boyfriend: artificial partners past, present, and future

Timothy Miller

 

Section 5: AI Ethics

17. (Un)ethical extractions: conceptual writing, appropriation, and the poetics of the public domain 

Kasia Van Schaik

 

18. ‘Full of stories’: AI, literature, and the law 

Rebecca Shaw

 

19. Rethinking intentionality in the era of AI 

Joanne Lipson Freed

 

Section 6: AI Interdisciplinarities

20. Computational literary studies and AI

Katherine Bode and Charlotte Bradley

 

21. What to expect when you’re expecting: on the creative potential of generative AI 

Tony Veale

 

22. Electricity and Alchemy: (un)explainable AI and (un)explainable literature

Genevieve Liveley

 

Section 7: AI Narratologies

23. Towards narrative AI studies

Torsa Ghosal

 

24. Towards an AI narratology: the possibilities of LLM classification for the quantification of abstract narrative concepts in literary studies

Claudia Carroll

 

25. Post-digital narrative analysis

Nuette Heyns

 

Section 8: AI Co-Creations

26. Co-creative multimodal authorship as procedural performance with DALL-E 

Astrid Ensslin and Jason Nelson 

 

27. Artificial theatres of the absurd

Boyd Branch and Piotr Mirowski

 

28. Artificially funny: collaborative play at the intersection of AI, literature and humour 

Rachel Hamilton

 

29. Artificial Intelligence, the poetic process, and the critical editor

Victoria Punch

 

Postscript

30. Luddites, literature, and LLMs

Kate Devlin