Challenges of Contemporary English Literature in the Age of the Artificial Intelligence Revolution

Abstract

This research will explore how contemporary literature in English has dealt with the spectre of artificial intelligence and the entry of AI into our lives by wrestling with the complicated issues of authorship, creativity, identity and narrative form that the advent of AI has engendered. This does not treat AI like any other tech phenomenon beast, but a social/cultural phenomenon that in its turn interrupts and disrupts literary production and critical reading alike. The section to follow then links posthuman identity and Digital mediation and surveillance, especially as they relate to AI-based systems of address and the ethical contradictions they enable, to the book's primary case study Blackfish City (2018), by Sam J. Miller. The project based, in theory, on posthumanist theory, digital humanities, and cultural criticism contends that contemporary literature does not merely mirror technological change, but rather, that it wrestles with the social consequences of technological change on the one hand or human agency or social justice on the other. It concludes that artificial intelligence does not obliterate human imagination but instead transforms it into a new realm of interaction with machine creativity.