Workshop: Approaching AI through Literature

Par Marcia Banks

This workshop proposes to reflect on the potential of literature and the imagination to help understand, face and orient reality. Starting from the earliest known phantasies of man-made sentient robots down to the contemporary ethical and ontological debates around the increasing importance of AI in numerous domains of human activity, we find a highlight on persistent concepts of technological enhancement and even hybridity of the human. Through concrete examples of the conception and questioning of AI tools long before the present-day debates, the workshop aims to open a discussion on the educational value of literary studies in facing societal challenges and shaping solutions for the future.