Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI

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Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI

by Nina Beguš

University of Michigan Press, 2025

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-0-472-07773-1

Paper: 978-0-472-05773-3

eISBN: 978-0-472-90532-4 (OA)

About the Book

Artificial Humanities explores how literature, history, and art can deepen our understanding of artificial intelligence and its development. By examining fictional representations of AI in parallel with actual technological developments, Nina Beguš presents a novel interdisciplinary framework for understanding the cultural, philosophical, and ethical dimensions of AI. She traces connections from Eliza Doolittle to ELIZA the chatbot and current language models, incorporates Slavic fictional examples from the Pygmalion paradigm, and compares mid-century science fiction and recent Hollywood films with contemporary developments in social robotics and virtual beings.

Highlighting the impact of human-like AI design, from gendered virtual assistants to romanticized social robots, the book shows how these technologies intersect with longstanding humanistic questions about the concepts of creativity and language as well as the relations between humans and machines. Additionally, the book explores AI’s applications in medical fields, particularly psychiatry and neurotechnology, including how AI interacts with the human body and mind to address conditions like paralysis. By emphasizing the philosophical and cultural implications of these technologies, Beguš highlights the need for responsible innovation that prioritizes human well-being as well as machine potential outside of human imitation. Accessible and thought-provoking, Artificial Humanities offers tools for analyzing and assessing technologies while they are being developed and invites readers to see how the humanities can guide us toward a more thoughtful future for AI.

About the Author

Nina Beguš is Researcher and Lecturer at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

2025 Artificiality Book Award Winner

— Artificiality Institute

“Beguš shows the possibilities in a deep archive of cultural representations of artificial intelligence. . . This is the major contribution of Artificial Humanities. The book joins many critiques of anthropomorphization in disputing “the idea of a machinic intelligence as a humanlike intelligence” (210). It stands out in strongly arguing that fictional narratives provide us with warnings about the inevitable disappointments and disasters when we conflate the two.”

— James E. Dobson, Critical AI

“The scope and ambition of Artificial Humanities is impressive. Beguš skillfully carves out a new subject area and brings together fields such as philosophy of language, AI ethics, science and technology studies, and literature and technology. This book has the potential to unite that work and prove the relevance of humanities scholarship to artificial intelligence.”— Megan Ward, Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character

The book reads as an adventure. It is impressive and so enlightening. It comes as a compass to follow how the creations of artificial beings, in works of fiction, myths and technological productions, have endlessly haunted one another.

— Pierre Huyghe, Artist of Idiom

“Reading this book provides the same pleasure one feels when a complicated proof suddenly resolves into a clean idea. The humanities are not late to AI; they have been there all along, hiding in the metaphors. Artificial Humanities gives them a proper role, not as ornamental critics but as collaborators in building systems that expand rather than shrink our imagination.”

— The One Percent Rule

“Artificial Humanities offers something rare: a mythology-first approach that treats cultural narratives as infrastructural determinants of technical design.”

— Ling Zi, Configurations

“Artificial Humanities addresses a crucial, until now overlooked, bridge between literary history and theories of artificial intelligence. The dialogue Beguš establishes between literary analysis and emerging questions around AI and LLMs enriches the humanities and engineering alike, and suggests further lines of inquiry in digital humanities, media studies, and the history of science and technology.”— Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory

“Scholars in the humanities who wrestle with how to meaningfully engage with AI will find this study invigorating and hopeful. . . Recommended.”

— S. Casey, Choice

“Focusing on the Pygmalion effect—taking a technological artifact for a human—Artificial Humanities makes a passionate plea for humanities and technologists to work more closely together. Arguing that stories affect what we imagine and think, Nina Beguš makes a compelling case for the importance of literary representations to our technological futures. Clearly written with a sweeping account of technological innovations from the eighteenth century to the present, Artificial Humanities should be required for anyone interested in AI and beyond.”— N. Katherine Hayles, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts

“The book stands out as a timely and foundational work. . . It positions “Artificial Humanities” as a potentially central discipline that will require ongoing negotiation and conceptualization by scholars in the literature, culture, and media, as well as by AI researchers and designers, in dialog with the rapidly expanding field of critical AI studies. Beguš compellingly shows why understanding AI today and shaping its future require precisely the kinds of knowledge the humanities have to offer.”

— Nana Ariel, AI & Society