Starting from the assumption that human-machine relationships in fictional and artistic forms provide a way of imagining our future coexistence, this panel explores the interplay between humans and AI beings in the visual arts and literature. The session also considers philosophical aspects such as dialogic consciousness, incentives and resisting, and asks what their implication is for human-machine relations. The aim is to contribute, from the digital humanism point of view, critical considerations to the on-going search for new concepts of human thought and interaction with artificial machines.
The panel has conceptual roots in studies such as Jensen’s What Was Artificial Intelligence (2022), Verdegem’s AI for Everyone? Critical Perspectives (2021), and Perspectives on Digital Humanities (2022) by Werthner et al., as well as the growing need for scholarship that directly explores the impact of AI technology in literature and the visual arts. The relationship between humans and machines, in various forms, has become a somewhat common trope in fiction (especially in science fiction and its cyberpunk subgenre); similarly, artists are increasingly resisting yet also integrating AI tools into their practice, raising profound questions about creativity, authorship and the nature of artistic expression. Cultural and literary narratives on human-machine interaction mirror the wishes and fears of humankind in the face of rapid and paradigm-shifting technological advances, and they can in turn feed back into AI development.
To promote discussion, the three panelists will each give 15-min presentations, and Dr. Alina Anton, the respondent, will pose questions to the panelists and the audience. The panel will be opened by Anna Ivanov, who takes a look at Ukrainian poet Stanislav Belsky’s most recent publication Friendly Conversations with Robots (2024) through the lens of posthumanism and actor-network theory. Based on earlier conversations with neural networks and the texts thereby generated, Belsky’s book consists of poetic dialogue between robots and neural networks. Anna Ivanov’s paper offers close readings of several of Belsky’s poems and argues that Belsky instantiates a new stage in machine-machine and machine-human(-machine) relations in poetry. Her contribution, for which she is providing her own rendering in English for the poems under analysis, highlights the universality of AI and of the issues it raises, as Belski is a representative of the Slavic literature.
Next, Prof. Hsuan L. Hsu will explore the sensorial worldmaking between humans and affectively attuned AIs. His paper picks up two recent works–Anicka Yi’s multimodal exhibition, In Love with the World (Tate Modern, London, 2021), and Elvia Wilk’s story, “The Fog,” written in response to Yi’s exhibition—that explore how humans and AIs engage in “sym-poeisis”. Using Donna Haraway’s concept “sympoeisis” (“making-with”) and drawing on thermoception and olfaction research, scholarship on “affective computing” and posthumanist theory, Prof. Hsuan illuminates how the embodied senses can expand our understanding of the affordances of AI.
Finally, Andrew Kettler’s “Remembrance of the Bicameral Mind: Sensory Worlds at the Interface” takes a more philosophical and dystopian approach to the unrelenting human quest to develop an Artificial General Intelligence, focusing on one of the possible risks associated with its advent. Thinking through Julian Jaynes’ ideas of the bicameral mind and the ancient world, and Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic philosophy, Dr. Kettler posits that Artificial General Intelligence, as it emerges within the networks of modern capitalism, creates significant existential risks because of the latent desires of the ancient human mind to be controlled.
Delving into the implications of communication with machines build to mimic the human brain, expanding the analysis to include theoretical questions about sensorial reciprocal worldmaking, and rounding the discussion with the philosophical question of possibly being subjugated by the developing AI, the session makes use of the expertise of panelists from across rank and discipline to explore the future coexistence of humans and machines and to offer attendees a thought-provoking discussion on the evolving dynamics of human-machine relations in art and literature.