Artificial Humanity, or AI in Literary Studies

Prof Anton Pokrivčák, University of Trnava, Slovakia;    Abstract: Our world is digitalised. It may be a trivial statement, but it is an unquestionable truth. We can see this at every turn and in every area of modern life. One can come across the digital means not only in everyday life, where they greatly help us in various everyday activities, but also in the fields of culture, education, science and research. Literature is no exception, since it is clear that, especially nowadays, digitalisation not only affects every stage of the literary process, at the level of the author, the text and the reader, but also manifests itself in literary scholarship and criticism, where recently there has been increased talk of digital humanities and digital literary scholarship. Such an approach to literary theory or criticism, according to some experts, is necessary because even today the literary process is already highly digitized. Most contemporary writers (as well as most of the public) certainly no longer write on typewriters but use computers, and every other stage of the production and reception of literary works is also highly digitized.

Digital humanities thus has become one of modern trends in literary criticism. Until now, it has been limited to textual studies and activities with digital archives. Recently, however, the emergence of artificial intelligence is drawing attention to the analysis of what has always been fundamental to literature, that is, the portrayal of humanity and humanness. This paper focuses on what artificial intelligence shows us in the study of some texts of American transcendentalism.