Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Simulation of human intelligence processes by computer systems, to create or interpret content in innovative and sometimes literary ways
David Jhave Johnston 2026-05-27

Explication

The term ‘artificial intelligence’ was coined by John McCarthy in 1955 in the proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, a 1956 conference that laid the foundational concepts for the field.  

AI is a branch of computer science concerned with the simulation of human and nonhuman cognitive processes through computational systems, increasingly applied in the generation, analysis, and transformation of digital and electronic literature. As language is at the core of human communication, and large language models increasingly emulate syntactical competence (i.e., to the casual observer, indiscernible from human writing), electronic literature in conjunction with AI is moving into unprecedented contentious terrain. Canonical scholar and pioneer e-poet John Cayley defines many risks to AI: “Large Language Models are not what they claim to be. They are, at best, Large Text Models.”  

Literary forms entangled with algorithmic procedure from the very outset of digital poetics. One example: in 1968, Margaret Masterman and Robin McKinnon Wood of the Cambridge Language Research Unit created computer-generated haiku exhibited in Cybernetic Serendipity. As Christopher Funkhouser notes in Prehistoric Digital Poetry, “Margaret Masterman and Robin McKinnon Wood developed a “slot” structure to generate orderly haiku at Cybernetic Serendipity (1968)” (34).   

Charles O. Hartman’s Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry (1996) carried that trajectory toward AI literature forward by developing custom writing software, framing algorithmic text generation as a form of prosthetic collaboration, a computational muse whose procedural routines supplied the poet with linguistic possibilities. Hartman’s work articulated a tension that persists today: between generative systems as external sources of language and the poet’s curatorial shaping of machinic excess. This dynamic of human-machine interaction is further complicated by broadening conceptions of cognition itself.  

As AI is simulation of human intelligence, e-lit scholars increasingly consider questions like:  

What is intelligence? How intelligent can machines be that emulate language? Pre-eminently, N. Katherine Hayles’s Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (2017), recognizes that “most human cognition happens outside of consciousness/unconsciousness; cognition extends through the entire biological spectrum, including animals and plants; technical devices cognize, and in doing so profoundly influence human complex systems” (5). Such a spectrum, explored thoroughly in her 2025 book Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts, situates AI not as alien intrusion but as part of a planetary cognitive ecology: “it seems clear to me that LaMDA, like GPT-3, has created networks of inferences that enable it to extrapolate to situations not explicitly in its training data and interpret them insightfully.” And it is hubris to consider that “only humans have the right to create meanings” (165).  

Contemporary electronic literature-artists extend these explorations in diverse ways. Included in ELC V3, Santiago Ortiz’s Bacterias argentinas (2004) provocatively uses grammatical networks to claim “genetic information is narrative”, echoing Hayles’s continuum between biological and technical cognition. Johannes Heldén and Håkan Jonson’s Evolution (2013) emulates Heldén’s writing style through database-driven generation, explicitly invoking Turing’s “Imitation Game”. Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland’s Sea and Spar Between (2016) expands combinatorial poetics to trillions of stanzas, foregrounding navigation and scale in generative literature. Dvid Jhave Johnston’s ReRites (2017-2019) enacted this augmented-creativity ecology through daily editing of neural net text. The work positioned author less as originator than as attentive editor grappling with machinic flood. The result was a hybrid authorship exposing the entanglement of editorial labor, aesthetic choice, and algorithmic productivity. Allison Parrish’s Reconstructions (2020) “is an infinite computer-generated poem whose output conforms to the literary figure of chiasmus. The program samples a sequence of text from a variational autoencoder neural network trained on the Gutenberg Poetry corpus, and pairs that line with a reconstruction of the sequence in reverse order.” Carrie Sijia Wang’s The System for Award Management (2018-2019) satirizes bureaucratic automation, demonstrating that AI in digital literature can also function as a mirror of governance and compliance; her more recent work 21st Century Frankenstein (2024-2025) created in “collaboration with New York City public school students… captures a group of teenagers’ curiosities, hopes, worries and critiques of artificial intelligence through performative chatbot interactions.”  

Across these examples, there are a multitude of trajectories. GPT-5 identified two as salient: AI as generative muse (Hartman) and AI as critical object (Hayles). Both shape electronic literature’s evolving aesthetics, binding computation to consciousness in ways that are at once animist, procedural, and ecological. This symbiotic unfolding of AI and literature invokes radically difficult (unresolvable) questions about bias, power, identity, authorship, evolution, and meaning that challenge how humanity values and re-evaluates itself through the recursive and tender inwardness of literature.

See Also

• Combinatorics - Combination and recombination of text, images, or other media to create varied storylines or poetic structures from a defined set of elements, enabling intricate patterns of interaction and interpretation
• Digital Poetry - Employment of computer technology to create, present, or enhance poetic experiences beyond traditional print formats
• Generative Poetry - Poetry created through the use of algorithms or computational processes, often resulting in works that can change or evolve with each iteration
• Posthuman Poetics - Literary arts that question humanist notions of subjectivity, embodiment, and agency in the context of advanced technology

Works Referenced

Cayley, John. Modelit: eliterature à la (language) mode(l). Electronic Book Review, 2 July 2023, https://doi.org/10.7273/2bdk-ng31   

Funkhouser, Christopher T. Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959–1995. University of Alabama Press, 2007.  

Hartman, Charles O. Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry. Wesleyan University Press, 1996.  

Hayles, N. Katherine. Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. University of Chicago Press, 2017.  

---. Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts. University of Chicago Press, 2025.  

Johnston, David Jhave. ReRites: Human + AI Poetry. 2017–2019. https://glia.ca/rerites/.  

Montfort, Nick, and Stephanie Strickland. Sea and Spar Between. 2016. https://www.stephaniestrickland.com/sea  

Ortiz, Santiago. Bacterias argentinas. 2004. https://www.moebio.com/santiago/bacterias/  

Parrish, Allison. Reconstructions. 2020. https://portfolio.decontextualize.com/  

Heldén, Johannes, and Håkan Jonson. Evolution. 2013. http://www.textevolution.net/  

Wang, Carrie Sijia. The System. 2018-2019. https://carriesijiawang.com/portfolio_page/the-system/ .  

---. 21st Century Frankenstein. 2024-2025. https://carriesijiawang.com/portfolio_page/21st-century-frankenstein/ .

Further Reading

Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity, 2019.  

Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press, 2021.  

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “Prepare for the Textpocalypse.” The Atlantic, 8 Mar. 2023.  

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile books, 2019.

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