Programme de la conférence

Comparative Literature, AI, and the Ethics of Digital Imagination

The dream—or nightmare—of artificial intelligence has long haunted speculative literature, but today it is no longer confined to fiction. As AI technologies increasingly shape our social, cultural, and epistemological landscapes, they raise urgent questions about what it means to be human and how we might live with the machines we have created. This session explores how comparative literature, digital humanities, and AI ethics intersect to address these questions. Drawing inspiration from UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, the session frames literary and digital inquiry as vital tools for imagining and negotiating the ethical, existential, and political dimensions of AI. Through case studies ranging from poetic language models to decolonial translation pedagogy, the session foregrounds literature’s role in shaping cultural responses to technological futures.

The speakers in this special session span a wide range of geographies, languages, and methodologies. From poetic experimentation with LLMs to decolonial translation practices, the speakers explore the cultural and ontological implications of AI in multilingual contexts, while reflecting on subjectivity and comparative literature in digital networks as well as addressing the transformation of scholarly publishing. Together, they offer a critical, multilingual, and transregional dialogue on how literature and digital tools can collaboratively respond to the ethical imperatives of our AI-infused world.