English Courses

Study of a specific topic within contemporary literary theory. Examples include The Rise and Fall of Deconstruction, Theories of the Avant Garde, and Film Theory.

Fall Semester information

395A: Literature and Theory: Advanced Topics: AI and the Future of Writing

The emergence of publicly accessible large language models such as ChatGPT represents a meteor impact in creative writing and literary studies, with the potential to alter the future evolution of the entire field. Our course will observe the effects of this impact. Many writers and scholars believe that large language models herald a cosmic crisis for our work: the antithesis of human creativity and critical thinking. Our syllabi outlaw them. Government wants to regulate them. The Writers Guild of America mustered against them. In a recent interview with Jensen Huang, founder of Nvidia, whose supercomputers trained ChatGPT, Stephen Witt speculated that journalists like himself would soon be made obsolete by AI, which could instantaneously produce structured, superior prose. Huang assured Witt not to worry: "It will come for the fiction writers first." And yet, our course will consider the unprecedented opportunities that this meteor strike offers for certain curious and adaptable mammals. What does AI assisted creativity look like? How can we conceive of human writing as viable and vital in the age of large language models? In order to answer these questions, we will survey recent studies of human and AI neural networks and creativity, including Margaret Boden's The Creative Mind, Marcus de Sautoy's The Creativity Code, and Ethan Mollick's Co-Intelligence. We will also review theoretical approaches that predate but also predict large language models, including Italo Calvino's "Cybernetics and Ghosts" and N. Katherine Hayles' How We Think. Finally, we will read a selection of recent fiction that speculates about the nature of writing and creativity in the age of AI, including Jeanette Winterson's The PowerBook and Richard Powers' Playground. Our own writing will include experimental exercises derived from these emerging ideas. The questions we pose are moving targets, and their tentative answers will be quickly outdated. The course simply offers an opportunity to assess the transition and evolution of our field at this threshold moment of impact.