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Academic Book Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI
University of Michigan Press, 2025.
Open acess here. Google Books link.
Preorder on the press website with a 40% discount code PREORDERS25, also on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Via Liverpool UP for Europe.
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 on December 2 at the Commonwealth Club, featuring a conversation with Ted Chiang and James Yu.
Book flyer. Recording of a book talk at BIDS.
Book featured in Scientific American and again in Scientific American, New Books Network, Cal Alumni Association, Colloquy, 96 Layers (text), Berkeley News, Napkin Poetry Review (English), Radio Prvi, Delo, El NorMal, Outsider, Radio Študent (Slovenian), Haaretz (Hebrew), Deutschlandfunk Kultur (German).
Recommended by Colloquy, Tamara Pavasović Trošt and Hannes Bajohr.
Responses in Speculative F(r)iction in Speculative Data Governance.
Book taught in Critical Topics in Digital Discourse (U of Gothenburg) and Questions of Theory (Harvard U). 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. I will share the slides here soon.
AGNIESZKA KURANT, SEMIOTIC LIFE (2022-25)
Trade Volume First Encounters with AI: Writers on Writing
Forthcoming in a public-facing series on writing with the University of Michigan Press.
I solicited, edited, and wrote an introduction to a volume of essays by professional writers, reflecting on how the entry of AI into their space has changed reading and writing.
Contributing authors are Hannes Bajohr, Quifan Chen, Ted Chiang, Joseph Dumit, Gerardo Con Diaz, Jasmin B. Frelih, Annelyse Gelman, Katy Ilonka Gero, Sheila Heti, Ken Liu, Nicholas Nardini, Allison Parrish, Alex Saum-Pascual, Sasha Stiles, Iain S. Thomas, and James Yu.
Papers
Nicole Oliva and Nina Beguš. 'The Midas Myth in Robotics: A Case for Liminality.' Under review.
Nina Beguš and Eoin Brodie. 'Convergent Thermodynamics: Planetary Flows of Entropy, Evolution, and Information.' Under review.
Nina Beguš. 'World Wide Models: Literary Tools for Cultural AI. ' Forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies.
Nina Beguš. 'Entropy.' Multispecies Lexicon Vol. II: The Planetary. Berggruen Institute Press, Forthcoming in 2026.
Nina Beguš, Metahaven (Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden), and Gašper Beguš. 'Latent Spacecrafts: Brains, GANs, Finnegans.' Antikythera, January 2026.
Nina Beguš. Experimental Narratives: A Comparison of Human Crowdsourced Storytelling and AI Storytelling. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications October 2024.
arXiv preprint from October 2023.
The paper has been used in AI pedagogy (English 101 at U of Louisiana at Lafayette) and AI and writing courses (Future Text at Stanford U, Writing with Robots at U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign). It was also used for practical experimentation with LLMs.
The paper was presented at the LMU München workshop, the Conference on AI, Science, and Society at the École Polytechnique, and at the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen.
In media: The Financial Times, The Independent, Berkeley News, Tech Xplore, Incredibble, NPR, KCBS, and KNX Radio, MBR video, The Scholarly Kitchen (English), PresseText (German), Haaretz (Hebrew), The Independent Turkçe (Turkish), LaSexta (Spanish), LeBigData (French), Scientias (Dutch), CNN Brasil (Portuguese), ICT Global (Hungarian), 续航教育/Forward Pathway (Chinese/English).Nina Beguš. Engaging Comparative Literature in AI Development. OSF preprint. July 2024. Updated version forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies's issue on Cultural AI.
Nina Beguš. A Typology of the Pygmalion Paradigm. Collected Papers of the 21st Congress of the ICLA: The Rhetoric of Topics and Forms 4 (2021): 319-30.
Nina Beguš. “The Identity Problem” in Prenatal Testing. Voices in Bioethics 6 (2020): 1-4.
Nina Beguš. A Tocharian tale from the Silk Road: A philological account of The Painter and the Mechanical Maiden and its resonances with the Western canon. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 30/4 (2020): 681-706.
The paper was taught in SANSKRIT 198 at Harvard U.
Thesis
Artificial Humanities: A Literary Perspective on Creating and Enhancing Humans from Pygmalion to Cyborgs. PhD Dissertation, Harvard University, 2020. 1-493.
Response in Literatura editorial.Romani Emila Filipčiča. BA+MA Thesis, University of Ljubljana, 2013. 1-77.
Fašistično proti utopičnemu v romanu Malina Ingeborg Bachmann. BA+MA Thesis, University of Ljubljana, 2013. 1-77.
Some of my earlier scholarly publications, written in Slovenian, are available on Google Scholar. English publications are available on Research Gate and Semantic Scholar.
Writing and Editing
I worked as a writer and editor for Airbeletrina, Apokalipsa, Literatura, Mentor, Pogledi, Radio Študent, Asymptote. During this time, I published short stories and essays, some of which are featured in the essay collection Eseji izseljenih milenijk in milenijcev by Beletrina.
I conducted interviews with poets and writers: Charles Simic, André Valter, Alvin Pang, and Boštjan Narat. I wrote editorials and book reviews on works by Salman Rushdie, Janez Ramoveš, Hanif Kureishi, Mitja Lovše, Festival Pranger, and many others.
Translations
I translated Alvin Pang's poetry, Herta Müller's speech, Jonas Hassen Khemiri's essay, and numerous essays by ex-Yugoslavian authors (Marko Pogačar, Dubravka Ugrešić, Igor Marojević, Srećko Horvat, and others), some of which are published in the essay collection The State of Matters: Anthology of Reflectives and Reflections (2012).
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