The rationale for organizing this session stems from a convergence of urgent developments in media studies, intercultural interaction, and recent literary scholarship. The proliferation of generative AI tools, virtual influencers, and other AI-scripted figures has introduced questions that literary and cultural scholars are uniquely positioned to address: Who or what constitutes a convincing, believable, and compelling character? What desires and projections animate our readings of—and identification with—artificial minds? How do gender, race, and embodiment structure the algorithmic creation of virtual identity? Such questions are not only theoretical provocations; in fact, they are issues embedded in the films we watch, the social media we consume, and the texts we teach.
Previous studies have analyzed the complex boundaries between traditional literary characters, AI-generated imitations, humanoid robots, and clearly mechanical companions. But while existing scholarship has addressed AI in science fiction, or posthumanism in literary theory, or the politics of digital media separately, this panel draws these conversations into productive dialogue, situating AI characterization as a site where technological, feminist, and cross-cultural critical frameworks intersect.
The first paper in the session, Jane Fedtke’s “‘I create..., but you’re just a remix artist’: Generative AI in The Last Screenwriter,” analyzes the 2024 feature film scripted entirely by ChatGPT, reading it through Braidotti’s posthumanist theory. Fedtke argues that the film’s human protagonist struggles to reassert creative agency against an AI character that progressively develops its own narrative verisimilitude and logic. In this context, the film stands as a posthuman emancipatory narrative that challenges human-centric models of authorship. As a result, this paper will anchor the session in contemporary debates about generative AI and literary production, and speak directly to ongoing conversations about human creativity, agency, technology—and the future of fiction.
Our second paper, Carole-Anne Tyler’s “Reading Machines: Virtual Companions and the Desire of the Other,” takes a psychoanalytic approach to the field, drawing on Lacan, Derrida, and Searle to interrogate the reader’s role in animating AI characters. Tracing a genealogy from Hoffmann's automaton, Olympia, to contemporary films such as Ex Machina and I’m Your Man, Tyler argues that the “soul” of a machine character is produced through the reader’s own desire. Deploying Bender’s published parrot critique, Tyler reframes the question of AI as fundamentally a problem of reading rather than computation, and thereby broadens the session’s scope to encompass the long literary history of artificial companions.
My own paper, “AI-Generated Influencers and Characters: Lil Miquela in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” analyzes the ways that virtual influencers create parasocial relationships that are both accurate and convincing. In addition, the paper discusses on-screen relations between such influencers and real human actors. By doing so, such interactions illustrate how virtual characters can stand as models for actual human interaction, expanded gender identities, and human-computer interaction (HCI) and other technologies.
Our fourth paper, Nayoung Bishoff’s “AI and the Gendered Posthuman Body: The Case of Rozy Oh in K-Pop Culture,” introduces the linkages between Korean culture and digital media forms, examining South Korea’s first hyper-realistic virtual influencer through the combined lenses of feminist theory, Crip Theory, and disability studies. Bishoff argues that Rozy Oh’s eternally youthful, flawless body reproduces ableist and heteronormative constructions of femininity, while her ostensible openness to public co-authorship ultimately consolidates rather than subverts these norms. This paper thus extends the session's view of characterization to include concepts of affective labor and social media, grounding posthumanist theory in a specific corporeal, feminist, and industrial context.
These four papers accordingly represent a diversity of methodological, gendered, and international perspectives. The presenters bring expertise in American film studies, psychoanalytic literary theory, feminist disability studies, and Korean media studies, ensuring that the session engages questions of AI characterization from multiple disciplinary and global vantage-points.
Throughout our session, we will also ensure that each speaker holds strictly to the time limits, so that we are absolutely certain to preserve a solid twenty minutes for both intercultural and technological discussion.