The flood of AI-generated text, images, video, and code into spaces previously assumed to be primarily authored by humans has brought with it fundamental questions about the future of art, literature, culture, and labor. Moral panic in higher education has frequently focused on the challenges AI presents through the lens of authorship, and particularly dishonesty in authorship, racing to regulate usage and maintain the integrity of the essay in the face of increasingly competent essay-writing machines.
This crisis of authorship is both new and wholly familiar, and the fields of electronic literature and digital humanities have been navigating its contours for decades. From combinatorial poetry to interactive fiction to procedurally generated narratives, electronic literature has long interrogated the boundaries of authorship, agency, and the human-machine creative interface. We've developed both critical frameworks and creative practices for understanding what it means to make meaning with and through computational systems.
Dr. Salter proposes a framework for understanding agentic AI as the next critical interface for our fields: one that, like all interfaces, is neither neutral nor inevitable, and that the humanities are uniquely positioned to critique, shape, and deploy.
Speaker
Dr. Anastasia Salter - University of Central Florida
Anastasia Salter is a professor of English at the University of Central Florida, and Director of Graduate Programs for the College of Arts and Humanities. Dr. Salter is the author or co-author of ten books on digital culture and electronic literature, including most recently Undertale: Can a Game Give Hope? (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Critical Making in the Age of AI (with Emily Johnson, Amherst College Press 2025), Playful Pedagogy in the Pandemic: Pivoting to Games-Based Learning (with Emily Johnson, Routledge 2022) and Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives (with Stuart Moulthrop, Amherst College Press 2021). Dr. Salter currently serves as President of the Electronic Literature Organization.
