AI in American Literature

Narratives that proclaim AI technologies’ objectivity, predictive ability, infallibility, and inevitability circulate across Big Tech, media, and popular culture. These narratives mislead publics about how AI technologies operate, what they can and cannot do, and how communities can respond to them. Contemporary AI fictions offer salient counternarratives that challenge and correct these dominant AI narratives. Instead, these counternarratives identify how these technologies work (and don’t work), how AI technologies are shaped by and extend historical power relations, and what myriad futures might be possible with AI. Key counternarratives that emerge from AI fictions include characterizing AI through its foundational entanglements with enslavement; reframing predictive AI technologies around their productions of stasis rather than predictions of the future; reconceptualizing AI as a tool that ontologically destabilizes – and thus challenges – normative definitions of the human that structure AI and societies alike; and foregrounding AI’s reproduction of racialized and gendered modes of domination. Taken together, these counternarratives engender alternate ways of understanding AI technologies and their impacts, and of imagining and realizing possible futures that can be brought to bear amidst, against, and with AI technologies.