Close your eyes and think of artificial intelligence. What do you see? Maybe an army of world-destroying robots, an evil supercomputer, a hyper-intelligent personal assistant, or even a romantic partner? Or, perhaps, your mind pictures the banal office software that helps you compose e-mails, proofread drafts, and debug code? This course will examine how our cultural imagination of artificial beings and superintelligent computers shapes—and is shaped by—the actual emerging technologies that we call “artificial intelligence,” from chatbots, to machine learning algorithms, to Large Language Models. Along the way, we will ask whether today’s artificial intelligence marks a quantum leap in human evolution, merely updates longstanding word-processing tools, or instead represents something altogether new, strange, and surprising. To investigate these issues, we will analyze narrative fiction, nonfiction essays, and films that depict AI or artificial beings in various forms. Using this material as a springboard, students will then develop their own critical perspectives through writing, considering how literature, art, and marketing influence our understanding of this technology.
- Teacher: James Draney