Book review: Nina Beguš: Artificial humanities: a fictional perspective on language in AI

The history of artificial intelligence is inseparable from literary imagination.The idea of artificial minds took shape in myth and narrative long before engineering provided material form.Nina Begu's Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI offers a compelling argument that this relationship is constitutive: literature has guided the ambition and direction of AI, from early reliance on mythic archetypes to the fictional patterns that shape contemporary large language models.This positioning of literature as a precondition of technology gives the book its distinctive force and relevance for current debates on AI's cultural implications.It is the most sustained and theoretically rigorous account to date of how humanistic knowledge shapes the imagination and design of AI.The field of literary approaches to AI is rapidly taking shape.