The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized various disciplines, including literature and comparative studies. This paper explores how AI-powered tools, such as machine learning and natural language processing, are reshaping the methodologies of comparative literature. By analyzing texts across multiple languages and cultural contexts, AI enables a broader and deeper exploration of literary themes, styles, and historical narratives.

This study examines AI’s role in literary analysis, focusing on its ability to detect intertextuality, translate complex works with cultural nuance, and generate new literary forms. Using case studies from diverse global literatures, the paper highlights both the opportunities and challenges AI presents to traditional literary scholarship. While AI enhances textual analysis and accessibility, it also raises ethical concerns about authorship, originality, and the human essence of literary interpretation.

By engaging with theoretical perspectives from digital humanities and comparative literature, this paper argues that AI should not be seen as a replacement for human literary scholars but rather as an innovative tool that enhances literary discourse. Ultimately, the integration of AI into comparative literature offers new pathways for cross-cultural engagement and a redefinition of what it means to study literature in the digital age.

Artificial Intelligence Literature is a brand-new combination of literature art with new technologies, programming, and digital platforms. How does the production mechanism of AI literature actually work? What is its spiritual essence? Does it have a subjectivity of literary creation? If so, what kind of subjectivity is such a subjectivity? Is it a product of human emotional experience? Are its mechanisms capable of artistic imagination, rational reasoning, and emotional perception? Based on the game theories, how are the production mechanisms of AI literature substantially different and distinct from the relevant game mechanisms? Can it produce spiritual experiences beyond what is already in the digital information base of human experience? Can it create new and original artistic forms? Can it produce so-called literary works that are innovative beyond the programming of its mechanisms? All of these require a theoretical perspective and philosophical reflection.

topic:B3. Convergence of Literature and Technology

• Artificial Intelligence, Posthumanism/Transhumanism, and Literary Discourse

Dystopian narratives explore “negative Utopias” placed in imaginatively and seemingly distant future settings in which the dreams and ideals of great human minds not only have been realized, but have become nightmares as well, turning against the human society they once sought to improve, develop, or help avoid catastrophes. In its portrayal of utopias turned upside down, where an imagined Future mirrors a very real Present, dystopian fiction has always been one of the most powerful and revealing indexes to the anxieties of contemporary times in relation to social conditions, political systems, and the potential dangers embedded in Utopian visions that are mainly governed by technology. In Klara and the Sun by renowned Japanese British novelist Kazu Ishiguro and The Mushroom by accomplished Omani author Mohamed Al-Agami, the text invites us to consider major contemporary challenges or nightmares: artificial intelligence, gene editing, and conditioning, all of which seem “out of our control.”

In the fictional world of Klara and the Sun, AI has already upended the social order and human relationships as we have gone accustomed to for centuries. Intelligent machines have become human companions, or “Artificial Friends.” Even children having had their intelligence upgraded via genetic engineering have become another form of AI. These enhanced, or “lifted” humans create a social schism, dividing people into an elite ruling order and an underclass of the unmodified and grudgingly idle. The narrator of the novel is Klara, an “artificial friend” to an invalid girl who has been lifted. Through Klara’s narrative voice, insights, and philosophical musings, as Ishiguro himself expressed, we “start to look at each other as individuals in a slightly different way.” What is it that makes individuals unique and special? “Is there really something like a soul inside our bodies? If we have enough data, will we be able to reproduce our character and personalities?”

The Mushroom, though built around a detective plot and enveloped in mystery, is philosophical in nature. It is narrated by three “robots” or “Insalat” an acronym for human (Ins إنس) + machine (alat ألة) often in monologue form. The novel focuses on the future superiority of the machine over man, the creature over the creator. Al-Ajami raises scientific and existential questions with in-depth references to the mathematics of the Persian polymath Al-Khwarizmi, the philosophy of Frensh Gilles Deleuze, and the symbolism of the Simurgh bird in the Persian Sufi poet Farid al-Din al-Attar's Conference of the Bird (Mantiq al Tayr منطق الطير). Each of the three robot narrators has a different perspective on the murder of an elderly woman who suffered schizophrenia and was, for years, taken care of by an Artificial companion and medical assistant. Like Klara, The Mushroom explores what constitutes a human being, feelings or the body? scientific capitalism and the lack of morality for the sake of profit, and the perceived conflict when machines replace humans.

With amazing prophetic tones and details, both novels act as witnesses to the ever-endangered core of our human nature: our empowering emotional interconnectedness and infallible sense of hope. Both novelists and their artificial but intelligent narrators host readers to live the atmosphere of a scientific experiment with intense spiritual and existential dimensions.