Critical AI
- Institution
- Binghamton University
- Scheduled
- Spring 2027
Description
Artificial intelligence saturates contemporary life. It circulates as discourse, in conversation, research, policy, and anxiety, and as a recurring figure in film and television (think of Silo). It also circulates materially, as the thing that now produces much of the text, image, and sound we encounter daily (think of AI-generated music and Shorts on YouTube, or Equinox’s notorious 2026 campaign). AI is at once a story we tell about the future and an infrastructure that makes the objects of the present, and it generates anticipation and unease.
Making sense of it requires social and cultural analysis as much as technical knowledge. This course therefore takes up artificial intelligence from the perspective of the humanities. We begin by asking what “artificial intelligence” is and trace the evolution of machine intelligence in cultural and literary texts, from eighteenth-century automata through science fiction, film, and advertising to the interfaces students use daily. Attending to how the term is used today, we consider how it functions as much as a marketing category as a technical one.
About two weeks of this course will be devoted to Asian and Asian American perspectives on the question of AI, though the question of why this figure has so consistently been given a race and a gender (think of Siri’s voice) will be one we ask throughout the semester. We will study techno-orientalism and the ways Asia and Asian people have been reimagined in literary and media imaginations as artificial, robotic, efficient, replicable, hypertechnologized, and ultimately not quite human. We will also read excerpts from Asian and Asian American as well as other multiethnic writers and artists who take up these figures in order to rework them.