As I dive into the dissertation period, I’m putting together a to-be-read and to-be-researched list for myself on topics that I want more background in before beginning my project in earnest. Without further ado:

Specific sources:

On human-AI co-creation, AI writing, and computation & writing/reading:

On AI/technology and selfhood:

  • “Descendent: AI and the Body Beyond Hybridization” by Roberto Alonso Trillo (chapter from Choreomata) (PDF)
  • “Artificial Selves” by A. Bailey (on AI, moral standing/obligations, and selfhood) (requested via ILL)
  • Self-Improvement: Technologies of the Soul in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Mark Coeckelbergh, especially Chs. 6-7 (on technology and new concepts of selfhood) (PDFs)
  • From Digital Twins to Digital Selves and Beyond: Engineering and Social Models for a Trans-Humanist World by Franz Barachini and Christian Stary (PDF)
  • “Augmenting Human Selves Through Artificial Agents – Lessons From the Brain” by Georg Northoff et al. — looks at “how a machine can augment humans rather than do what they do, and we extend this beyond AGI-style tasks to augmenting peculiarly personal human capacities, such as well-being and morality” (PDF)
  • “Speculating on Risks of AI Clones to Selfhood and Relationships: Doppelganger-phobia, Identity Fragmentation, and Living Memories” by Patrick Yung Kang Lee et al. (more about clones than hybridization, but ideas like identity fragmentation could still be relevant?) (PDF)

On AI and YA fiction:

  • “Virtually Grown Up: Posthumanism and Artificial Intelligence in Fiction for Young People” by Lindsay Burton in Artificial Intelligence and Its Discontents, ed. Ariane Hanemaayer (PDF)
  • “Technology, Oppression, and Resistance in Speculative Young Adult Fiction” by Brady L. Nash (PDF)
    • “This article explores the potential of speculative science fiction novels to help readers explore the complex social and material entanglements of digital technologies. The article also discusses the dual pedagogical layers of speculative YA texts as direct contributors to readers’ understandings of the world and as educational tools within language arts classrooms”

On other relevant aspects of AI (epistemological, ethical, social):

  • “Stop Treating AI Models Like People” by Sasha Luccioni and Gary Marcus (AI and anthropomorphism)
  • “Will AI make us crazy?” by Dawn Stover (AI and public health/mental health, especially for young people) (PDF)
  • “Minding the gap(s): public perceptions of AI and socio‐technical imaginaries” by Laura Sartori and Giulia Bocca (perceptions of and exposure to AI among different demographics — age, gender, expertise) (PDF)

On interactive, digital, and electronic fiction:

  • IF Theory Reader, ed. Kevin Jackson-Mead and J. Robinson Wheeler (overview of interactive fiction) (PDF)
  • “Digital Fiction” by Scott Rettberg (background on various forms of digital fiction) (PDF chapter)
  • Interactive Digital Narrative, ed. Hartmut Koenitz (theoretical academic overview)
  • Second person: role-playing and story in games and playable media, ed. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin
  • Avatars of Story by Marie-Laure Ryan
  • “Serious Interactive Fiction: Constraints, Interfaces, and Creative Writing Pedagogy” by Robert Terry and Lisa Dusenberry (more about pedagogy, but might have some helpful bits about the affordances of Twine fiction and what it means for creative writing) (PDF)
  • Writing Interactive Fiction with Twine by Melissa Ford (practical guide to Twine) (PDF)
  • If the above sources aren’t sufficient: Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction by Nick Monfort (request via ILL)

Fiction:

  • AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan (grounded representations of AI futures)
  • Blindsight by Peter Watts (considers questions of consciousness, hybridization, otherness, the philosophy of technology)
  • The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey (looks at adoption of tech amid many of the same societal problems we have today)
  • I am AI by Ai Jiang (cyborg/AI writing program) (borrow via Hoopla)

 

Other topics that I haven’t yet researched sufficiently:

  • Ethical ways of using AI in creative practice
  • Generational divides in responses to/engagement with/effects of AI
  • What it means to write about/with AI specifically for YA (though from my searching, it seems that literature on this topic is quite scarce)

 

Story decisions that my research will inform and/or that I need more research to inform:

  • Globalization/localization and how physical space interacts with social and technological factors in the story. In one of my previous blogs, I wondered, what would the traces/fossils/skeleton of the globalized past look like in a society where technology has been used for re-localization? Could they offer some kind of organizing principle for the interactive elements of my piece?
  • How do the scholar, worm, and AI interact/overlap as characters/entities? Perhaps they are less diametrically opposed than it would initially seem… So how do their choices intertwine with each other in unanticipated ways, and what implications does this have for ethics, selfhood, and agency (of both characters and readers)?
  • Hector Amaya observes that technology and computation may be understood as failing to capture reality while simultaneously powerfully affecting reality; conversely, technology may be seen as “the exteriorization of interiority, as the social, political, epistemic, and material manifestation of the personal” (622). Although of course both can be true to varying extents, I think it’ll be important to decide which version predominates in my imagined future — whether AI generally steers humans away from their selves, or whether it can embody selfhood (or whether, perhaps, certain modes of relationality and hybridization might lead to each outcome, depending on the person and context).
  • Inspired by Klein’s podcast…
    • When thinking about a new medium, we must consider not just what message the content (e.g., articles, tweets, shows) is sending, but also what message the medium itself (e.g., newspapers, Twitter, TV) is sending. So what will/should that be for AI in my world?
    • Will another model of the internet, responding to the revolution of AI and people’s dissatisfaction with the current internet, emerge? Perhaps in parallel with the platform internet of AI-based hyper-customization, which is where the internet of 2024 is tending?
    • What are the economic pressures at play? How are people making money off AI?
    • In our society, self-worth is based on work; we won’t be able to change these social values/mindsets as quickly as AI develops. So AI challenges how and what we value about people. Given that, what are the social values/mindsets in my imagined future, and how have they (not) changed?

 

Works Cited:

Amaya, Hector. “On human and technological boundaries.” Journal of Communication, vol. 73, 2023, pp. 621–623. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqad034.

Klein, Ezra, host. “Will A.I. Break the Internet? Or Save It?” The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times, 5 Apr. 2024, Apple Podcasts, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000651522107.

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