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Academic Book Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI
University of Michigan Press, 2025.
Paper, Hardcover, and Open Acces.
Order on the press website with a 50% discount code HOLIDAY25 or on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Via Liverpool UP for UK, various bookstores for Germany.
Press catalog in Chinese and Spanish.
The book is getting translated into Chinese (East China Normal University Press).
Humanities have studied the human and language for centuries and bring necessary depth to the creation and implementation of AI, focusing on cultural and philosophical implications.
In the book, I present my research program on how to bring the humanities into the very creation of technologies on the case of AI-based language technologies: chatbots, virtual assistants, social robots, communicative neurotechology, and large language models.
Looking at actual and fictional representations of AI, based primarily on the Pygmalion myth, I argue against the humanlike trajectory in the development of this technology.
Book launch at the Commonwealth Club, featuring a conversation with Ted Chiang and James Yu; listen here.
Book flyer. Recording of a book talk at BIDS. HigherEd talk.
An interview on the value of the humanities in the age of AI.
Book featured in Berkeley News, The Science of Fiction, Scientific American and again in Scientific American, New Books Network, Cal Alumni Association, TechExplore, Colloquy, 96 Layers (text), Hellenic News of America, Berkeley News, Mirage News, Napkin Poetry Review (English), Radio Prvi, Delo, El NorMal, Outsider, Strašno Hudi, Airbeletrina, Radio Študent (Slovenian), Huxiu (Chinese), Haaretz (Hebrew), Deutschlandfunk Kultur (German).
Artificiality Institute Award for Book 2025.
Recommended by Hannes Bajohr, Jonathan Boymal (also on Substack), Patricia Burke, Vint Cerf, Clara Cianferotti, Colloquy, Claire van Leeuwen, Filippo Giustini, Rita King, Brian Merchant, Tamara Pavasović Trošt, Pranavi Vedula, Colin W. Lewis, Nick Tang, and Tiago Torrent.
Responses in Speculative F(r)iction in Speculative Data Governance, Delo, and LUD Literatura.
Book taught in Critical Topics in Digital Discourse (U of Gothenburg) and Questions of Theory (Harvard U), Stanford U, Cornell U, Oregon State U, and the Federal U of Juiz de Fora. I am teaching a course based on the book at Berkeley's College of Computing, Data Science, and Society, titled Artificial Humanities: AI, Language, and Fiction, next year.
AGNIESZKA KURANT, SEMIOTIC LIFE (2022-25)
Trade Volume First Encounters with AI: Writers on Writing
Forthcoming in Fall 2026 in a public-facing series with the University of Michigan Press.
Paper, Hardcover, eBook. Preorder from the press or Barnes & Noble, ships in October 2026.
How has the entry of AI into the space of writing and reading changed how we write and think about writing?
Introduction: Navigating a New Topos by Nina Beguš, editor
Language Models and Desire: A Lexicon by Allison Parrish
Why AI Won't Make Art Easy to Make by Ted Chiang
On Writing Poets by Sasha Stiles
Linguistic Mirrors by James Yu
No One Writes Alone by Hannes Bajohr
The Art of Copying by Ken Liu
Deep Writing: A Hermetic Practice in LLMs Era by Qiufan Chen
Co-Writing with AI (Academic Style) by Joseph Dumit and Gerardo Con Diaz
Prayers, Essays, Poems and Games by Iain S. Thomas
Chasing Alice by Sheila Heti
Ten Trillion Things I Hate About You by Nicholas Nardini
About Life by Jasmin B. Frelih
Novel Audiences by Katy Ilonka Gero
What If in the End by Alex Saum-Pascual
First Encounters with AI gathers some of today’s most original literary minds to explore one of the central artistic and cultural questions of our era: What happens to writing when language is no longer used only by humans? As large language models enter the public imagination and everyday creative practice, writers across genres—novelists, poets, screenwriters, essayists, translators, scholars, technologists, language artists—are grappling with profound shifts in how stories are conceived, crafted, and shared.
This volume brings together seventeen acclaimed contributors from around the world to reflect on their early, intimate encounters with generative text at a moment when artificial intelligence feels at once thrilling, unsettling, and unavoidable. Their essays portray AI not as a monolith, but as a dynamic field of possibility and tension between creativity and computation, where longstanding human questions about intention, desire, authorship, labor, and value gain new urgency. Ranging from deeply personal meditations to critical provocations, from philosophical investigations to playful experiments, these writers reveal how writing tools shape writing itself—and what is at stake when those tools begin to imitate us. Curated and introduced by editor Nina Beguš, First Encounters with AI offers readers an essential guide to navigating this new literary landscape. Together, these essays map the terrain of our first contact zone with AI, offering clarity, insight, and imaginative depth at a moment of radical change.
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