Pre-conference Workshop: "Virtuality, AI, and Comparative Literature"

Organizer: Alexa Alice Joubin is a leading voice on AI, social justice, and higher education. She is Professor of English, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Theatre, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she directs the Digital Humanities Institute. She is a faculty of the Trustworthy AI Initiative and an affiliate at the NSF's Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society. In 2024, she was named the inaugural Public Interest Technology Scholar.

When ChatGPT was released in 2022 its marketing strategies emphasized the AI’s ability to write poetry. How did literary genres anticipate the virtuality created by AI? Literary studies deal with virtuality in world-making, parallel universes, and metaverse. Missing in current debates about AI are insights from comparative literary studies. One core feature of generative AI is its production of virtuality through simulation of textual patterns. Virtuality, or the potential existence of worlds, is a notion prevalent in both literary and AI studies. Notions of bodymind in the era of AI can renew our engagement with literary debates over empiricism. 
Focusing on virtuality and AI, this session brings fiction’s world-making capacity to bear on contemporary debates about techné which governs all forms of synchronous and asynchronous representational technologies. The session will also explore pedagogical implications of virtuality and AI.