Romanticism and artificial intelligence stand in a recursive relation: each supplies a vocabulary for theorizing the other. This panel takes up that reciprocity, reading Romantic thought through AI and AI through its Romantic inheritance.

The humanities have never stood outside their technologies; Kittler's claim that thought is conditioned a priori by its media applies no less to Romanticism than to any later formation. Romantic philosophy of nature already theorizes emergent self-organization in terms AI research now approaches under different names: emergence, self-supervision, autopoiesis. Hui names Romanticism "a proto-cybernetics" (2019); this panel asks what follows from reading Romanticism as a proto-AI as well, not a source of imagery but a body of thought that worked out recursive, self-generating systems before computation gave them a name. Schelling's Naturphilosophie, where nature is unconscious productivity striving toward self-consciousness, offers a model of emergence irreducible to its cybernetic descendants.

The recursivity runs both ways. AI returns to Romanticism to think through problems it inherited without originating. Coleridge's distinction between fancy and imagination, mere mechanical aggregation against organic synthesis, was already an argument against automation, against the reduction of creation to combinatorics, and it resurfaces almost unchanged in the question of whether generative models produce anything beyond statistical recombination. Kant's account of genius as the faculty that gives the rule to art without following one, his account of human agency as what exceeds mere rule-following, becomes, again, a live question, addressed now to machines rather than to men of talent.

AI's self-description, meanwhile, is saturated with unacknowledged Romantic tropes: the sublime scale of the network, the rhetoric of emergent consciousness, genius and inspiration as evaluative categories for machine output, the fantasy of a total, self-organizing archive of knowledge. This panel treats these borrowings as a conceptual debt that must be theorized.

We invite papers addressing Romanticism and AI from any of the following angles, or others:

1. Romantic philosophy of nature (Schelling, Novalis, Coleridge) and machine emergence
2. Romantic theories of imagination, genius, and human agency against machine automation
3. Romanticism as a disavowed source for AI's self-description
4. Kittlerian or media materialist readings of Romantic technics
5. Romantic fragmentary and encyclopedic forms in relation to training data and corpora
6. AI as inheritor of Romantic anxieties about the artificial (Frankenstein, the golem)
7. Frankfurt School responses to AI read through their Romantic inheritance