Posthuman Literature. Reflections on some Strategies of the Narrative Usage of Artificial Intelligences

Abstract

This article presents a reflection on the way in which literature has appropriated the challenges of the so-called post-humanism in its various practices, incorporating, beyond its mimetic function, exercises that imply the transformation of creative, critical and investigative functions. derived from its support in technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data analysis. The awareness of the contemporary imperative of a detachment from the anthropocentric vision and the vigilant, responsible and humble attention to the new sensitivities, challenges and possibilities that this condition opens up, are the analytical criteria that guide this reflection. In the first part, nine ways of understanding post-human literatures are presented, without intending to exhaust them, emphasizing the conceptual and practical challenges involved in artificial intelligence support for the creation of texts and literary expressions. In the second part, seven examples of what we consider exercises that illustrate the post-humanist turn in literature are briefly described. In the conclusions we emphasize the implications of an algorithmic turn for culture, the need to attend to empathic artificial intelligences as an imperative for new creative practices, the horizon that quantum computing opens for reflection as a model of human programming and the called to understand, address and extend the new sensitivities and creative and literary spaces that all these circumstances configure for the work of the creator, the researcher and the scholar of literature.