1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of AI and Literature
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, as well as illustrating 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 and 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.
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
Biography
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 twentieth- and twenty-first century literature, primarily focusing upon 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 (Oxford University Press, 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.
