In this class, we will explore over three thousand years of literature about what it means to create and live with artificial intelligences. In the process, we will address urgent questions about the purpose of work, the nature of love, the limits of agency, and the essence of creativity, drawing wisdom from writers ranging from Aristotle to Zhuangzi and William Shakespeare to Mary Shelley, and scrutinizing texts from the Book of Genesis and Gospel of Matthew to tweets by @sama and essays by Ted Chiang. At the same time, we will ask whether literature itself might constitute a kind of AI, with its vast repository of data about human experience and its variety of forms for recombining them–noting that, at least since Alan Turing, computer scientists have treated imitation or mimesis of human language as a key test of their machines.

Finally, we will investigate how contemporary writers and artists are incorporating generative AI into their creative practices and experiment with doing so ourselves, through a series of projects that include assembling an Encyclopedia of Ancient Robots, playing Turing’s “imitation game” with Shakespeare’s sonnets, and prompting custom chatbots to improvise a play. By the end of the semester, students will have developed strong skills in close reading by analyzing canonical texts from several genres and worked with several kinds of generative models. You will have encountered treasures from Harvard’s archives and museums and produced a portfolio of work that you will have an opportunity to exhibit on campus.
No prior knowledge of coding is required.