This project investigates how science fiction has represented artificial intelligence, with particular attention to the text technologies through which machines are imagined to write, converse, translate, remember, and persuade. Rather than asking whether literature predicted the present accurately, it treats science fiction as a speculative laboratory in which the ethical, epistemic, political, and aesthetic stakes of AI have been rehearsed, contested, and reframed long before they arrived as engineering problems. By foregrounding imagined text-machines — from the imitation game and the talking computer to the writing machine, the universal translator, and the personalised tutor — the subproject connects the cultural history of machine intelligence to TEXT's wider inquiry into contemporary cultures of text. It reads canonical and non-Anglophone works alike to recover a more pluralistic understanding of intelligence than the dominant computational paradigm allows. Working across identity and demarcation, social and political imaginaries, and the poetics of machine-generated language, it shows how the literary imagination has supplied much of the vocabulary through which a society now saturated by generative systems understands what such systems are, what they displace, and what they might yet become. 

Creativity and Co-Creation · Addressing LLM-Hard Problems in Practice