Books

Book Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI (2025)
Open Access and individual chapters available on JSTOR. Order on the press website with a 30% discount code ARTHUM40 or on Barnes & Noble and Amazon. Kindle format is currently free.
European orders via Liverpool UP, various bookstores for Germany.
Book flyer. The book is getting a Chinese translation under East China Normal University Press (2027).

Cite: Beguš, Nina. 2025. Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI. University of Michigan Press. DOI: 10.3998/mpub.12778936.
Available open access.

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 reviews AI & Society, Choice, Critical AI, Configurations.

"Artificial Humanities establishes the method; the next chapters remain to be written by readers equipped with Beguš’s tools for uncovering mythological infrastructures embedded in systems too often taken as purely technical."

“Artificial Humanities offers something rare: a mythology-first approach that treats cultural narratives as infrastructural determinants of technical design.”

"Beguš models a form of humanities scholarship indispensable for technical domains."
- Ling Zi, Configurations

“The book stands out as a timely and foundational work. . . It positions “Artificial Humanities” as a potentially central discipline that will require ongoing negotiation and conceptualization by scholars in the literature, culture, and media, as well as by AI researchers and designers, in dialog with the rapidly expanding field of critical AI studies. Beguš compellingly shows why understanding AI today and shaping its future require precisely the kinds of knowledge the humanities have to offer.”
- Nana Ariel, AI & Society

“Beguš shows the possibilities in a deep archive of cultural representations of artificial intelligence. . .  This is the major contribution of Artificial Humanities. The book joins many critiques of anthropomorphization in disputing “the idea of a machinic intelligence as a humanlike intelligence” (210). It stands out in strongly arguing that fictional narratives provide us with warnings about the inevitable disappointments and disasters when we conflate the two.”
- James E. Dobson, Critical AI

“Scholars in the humanities who wrestle with how to meaningfully engage with AI will find this study invigorating and hopeful. . . Recommended.”
- S. Casey, Choice

Recorded book talks:
Launch at the Commonwealth Club, featuring a conversation with Ted Chiang and James Yu.
Book chat with Hannes Bajohr.
Shorter book talk.
AI, humanities, and education talk.
An interview on the value of the humanities in the age of AI.
2025 Artificiality Institute Award. Listen to our conversation here. Summit 2026.

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).

Pierre Huyghe’s annotated manuscript of Artificial Humanities included in his Fondation Beyeler exhibition, 24 May–13 September 2026.

Recommended by Hannes Bajohr, Jonathan Boymal (also on Substack), Patricia Burke, Vint Cerf, Clara Cianferotti, CMU Library, Colloquy, Valeria Federici, María Freiría, Claire van Leeuwen, Harvard Magazine, Filippo Giustini, Rita King, Lina Orujuela, Marussiac, TJ McKenna, Brian Merchant, Tamara Pavasović Trošt, Dorina Strori, Pranavi Vedula, Colin W. Lewis, Nick Tang, and Tiago Torrent.

Responses in The Oxford Literary Review Supplement, Harbus, Drops, Speculative F(r)iction in Speculative Data Governance, Reincantamentox, Benjamin Demassieux, The Last Analogue, Delo, Aplavz, and LUD Literatura. Book on AI and narratives.

Observatory Deckard was launched in July 2026 as a framework for artificial humanities research.

Workshops based on this framework at ICCC 2026 and ArtEZ.

Book taught in Critical Topics in Digital Discourse (U of Gothenburg) and Questions of Theory and Humanities AI Lab (Harvard U), Stanford U, Cornell U, Oregon State U, IMS Unison 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.

Artificial Humanities book series at the University of Exeter Press.