What happens to art and storytelling when AI stops being a tool and becomes an agent?

Generative AI has already unsettled our frameworks for thinking about authorship, authenticity, and creative expression — forcing us to ask what it means for something to be genuine, original, or meaningfully human. The emergence of agentic AI — systems that can reason, decide, and act autonomously — compounds these questions in new and underexplored ways. Where generative AI mimics the products of human creativity, agentic AI operates outside the logic of narrative altogether: no arc, no stakes, no perspective, no meaning-making. What does that do to the stories we tell, and the ways we tell them?

This seminar brings together three researchers working across media theory, literary studies, and art history to explore what AI — generative and agentic — means for narrative, delegation, counterfactuality, and human expression. Bringing together perspectives from Australia and France, the seminar draws on two research cultures with distinct but complementary approaches to AI and the humanities — and on collaborations forged through recent exchanges between RMIT and leading French research institutions. It is a rare opportunity to think across media theory, literary studies, art history, and creative practice — and to explore together what these shifts mean for narrative, authorship, and human expression.

Alexandre Gefen is Directeur de Recherche at Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS/THALIM, Paris) and one of France’s foremost theorists of AI and literary culture. Author of Créativités artificielles and the forthcoming L’Intelligence artificielle: une histoire (CNRS Éditions, 2026), he was co-curator of Le monde selon l’IA at the Jeu de Paume and has been a pioneer of Digital Humanities in France.

Ada Ackerman is Chargée de Recherche at CNRS (THALIM, Paris) and an art historian specialising in the intersections of cinema, painting, and visual culture. Co-curator of Le monde selon l’IA at the Jeu de Paume — the landmark 2025 exhibition exploring how AI is transforming visual culture — her work spans cultural transfers between Europe, the United States, and the former Soviet Union, and the entanglements between humans and non-humans in image-making.

Daniel Binns is Senior Lecturer in Media at RMIT University and Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S). His research sits at the intersection of critical AI studies, media theory, and creative practice; recent work explores media-materialist approaches to AI outputs and systems, and speculative worldbuilding as a means of inhabiting and critically understanding them.

This event is hosted by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S).

Image credit: Nadia Piet & Archival Images of AI + AIxDESIGN / Ways of Seeing / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0

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