This project aims to explore intersections of literature, literary studies, education, and critical thinking about recent developments in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI).
The field of literary studies has established tools and theoretical approaches for analysing and interpreting texts, which can contribute to thinking through our engagement with GenAI. The notion of “the unreliable narrator” (Booth, 1983; Phelan, 2005) is one such concept that can be used to critically reflect on chatbots that speak in the first person and on the sometimes hallucinatory and unreliable texts produced by GenAI. Other concepts derived from literary theory, such as “the death of the author” (Barthes, 1967) and the emergence of the reader as (co-)creator of the text (Rosenblatt, 1938; Iser, 1974; Fish, 1980) anticipate the (ethical) questions raised by GenAI technologies (Yang & Kim, 2025) and may be able to help students think through their own ethics of reading, that is their own role and responsibility in the (co-) creation of AI-generated texts.
Literary texts have long imagined mechanical or synthetic beings constructed by humans that achieve autonomy and go on to trouble their creators, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021). Texts such as Roald Dahl’s short story “The Great Automatic Grammatizer” (1954) and Andy Griffith and Terry Denton’s The 39-Storey Treehouse (2013) go so far as to imagine machines created to produce stories, with potentially devastating consequences. Can texts like these help us – and our students – reflect on the ethics and implications of GenAI?
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Micrographic labyrinth drawn in fine calligraphy (early 17th century) Public domain: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/735626