What happens to the relationship between creators, audiences, and cultural industries when human beings increasingly act as curators, editors, and interpreters of machine-generated outputs rather than as sole originators of artistic works? More importantly, how can comparative literary and media studies help us understand the transformations that generative AI introduces into contemporary creative practices?

This seminar explores the aesthetic, ethical, and economic implications of generative AI in cultural production. Moving beyond both celebratory narratives of technological innovation and dystopian accounts of human replacement, it examines how human agency continues to shape AI-assisted creativity.

Drawing from comparative literature, media studies, digital humanities, and the emerging fields of critical AI studies and AI aesthetics, the seminar starts from the premise that creativity has always involved selection, recombination, and interpretation. Generative AI intensifies these dynamics by repositioning creators as the first readers of machine outputs. Human mediation therefore remains central to questions of aesthetic value, authorship, copyright, legitimacy, and economic recognition.

The seminar is particularly interested in the relationship between artistic and economic value in contemporary cultural industries. While generative AI promises efficiency and new opportunities, it may also reinforce standardization, obscure creative labour, and redistribute value toward technological infrastructures. At the same time, experimental practices suggest that AI can become a creative interlocutor rather than merely a tool of automation.

Narrative forms offer a productive perspective on these transformations. Literature, television, screenwriting, fanfiction, video games, comics, and other transmedial environments reveal how creative value is negotiated in the age of generative technologies.

Topics of interest may include (but are not limited to):
• Authorship and creativity in AI-assisted production;
• Human mediation and AI-assisted storytelling;
• Artistic versus market value;
• Copyright and intellectual property;
• Experimental uses of generative AI;
• Fanfiction, participatory cultures, and creative labour;
• Authenticity, originality, and audience perceptions;
• Editing and curation in AI-assisted works;
• Ethical frameworks for AI in the arts;
• Human-machine collaboration and posthuman theories of creativity;
• Teaching literature and creativity in the age of generative AI.

We welcome interdisciplinary contributions from scholars in comparative literature, literary and media studies, digital humanities, communication studies, creative writing, philosophy, law, and related fields. By examining changing conditions of cultural production, this seminar seeks to understand not only what generative AI can create, but also how human beings continue to generate meaning, value, and responsibility within hybrid creative ecologies.