From Christopher Strachey’s Love Letter Generator, one of the earliest computer programs for automatic literary writing, to today’s rapidly proliferating AI writing tools, such as NovelAI’s Xialong, Sudowrite, and Novelcrafter, models fine-tuned from the general-purpose large language models like GPT or GLM, the development of AI technologies has introduced new ways of literary production. Moreover, recent breakthroughs in multimodal generative models for image, audio, and video production such as Seedance, Sora, and Kling, have greatly facilitated the remediation of literary works into other media forms, including visual art, AI-generated comics and manga dramas, audiobooks, animation, and video. Literary creation is therefore increasingly becoming a multimodal and cross-media process in which texts can be generated, adapted, and circulated across different technological platforms and representational forms. As literary researchers, authors, and AI practitioners, we are called upon by these developments to rethink several key issues in literary criticism: creativity, form, authorship, and human agency. 

Building on these concepts and their reinterpretation in the age of AI, this seminar seeks to facilitate discussion around the following questions: Can AI-generated literature and art works be considered a form of artificial creativity? Does AI expand human creativity, automate it, or reshape what creativity means? How does the algorithmic identification and reproduction of textual and visual patterns confirm, complicate, or challenge structuralist theories of cultural production and theories of intertextuality and intermediality? How does human–AI collaboration challenge traditional ideas of individual authorship? What does authenticity mean when a text or artwork is partially or entirely generated by AI? What happens to the boundaries between literature and other art forms in multimodal AI production? Does AI-assisted literary research risk becoming trapped in a feedback loop of using AI to analyze AI when it is applied to AI-generated literature? How do readers, critics, publishers, and literary institutions respond differently to AI-generated works across literary genres and fields, particularly in online literature and belles-lettres? 

We welcome papers examining how AI is reshaping literary creation, interpretation, and authorship. Possible topics include AI-generated literature and multimodal works, AI-assisted methods of literary research, and literary or artistic representations of human–AI creativity, authenticity, and agency.