Writing Critically and Creatively After the Large Language Model

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a topic discussed so widely and intensely in the university sector that it threatens to engulf all others by putting Large Language Models at the centre of everything we do as scholars, students and administrators. Uncertainty about the damage chatbots are wreaking on the physical environment is matched only by anxiety about its effects on the cognitive environment, the shifting mental and informational landscape of social life that is increasingly experienced as disorientating, isolating, and untrustworthy. Even the way we talk about ‘AI’ is made significant by the facility of Big Tech to monetise ‘doomerist’ threats of impending disaster and bluff politicians into the belief that neural networks trained on vast amounts of text are too complex to understand or regulate. In this feverish context, in which AI looms as the last act in the total privatisation of education, the importance of developing critical AI literacies in the humanities and the wider public can hardly be underestimated. Literary Studies and Creative Writing are the forefront of the project to develop a critical theory of Large Language Models that is able to keep step with the rapid release of commercial AI applications while preserving the integrity of the mission of public education in liberal-democratic societies.   

In this two-day WSRC event, Distinguished Professor Lauren Goodlad and Chair of Critical AI at Rutgers University will deliver the keynote presentation on the life cycle writing… and lead seminars on the role of Critical AI in the teaching, learning and praxis of Literary Studies and Creative Writing.

PROGRAM

Thursday 26 November

• 9:20am: Registration

• 9:40am: Seminar One: Death of the Author in Theory: redefining the field (Reading: Lauren Goodlad, ‘We have always been action theorists’)

• 11:10am: Tea Break

• 11:40am: Seminar Two: Death of the Author in Practice: fiction writing and LLMs (Reading: Reading: Aidan Marchine, ‘Death of an Author’ with afterword by Stephen Marche)

• 1:00pm: Lunch

• 2:05pm: Session Three: Lauren Goodlad on Critical AI Literacy (Reading: ‘Teaching Critical AI Literacies’)

• 3:15pm: Finish

Friday 27 November

• 9:50am: Register

• 10:00am: Keynote session: Lauren Goodlad, ‘The Lifecycle of Writing Subjects: GenAI and the Future of Writing’

• 11:20am: Tea Break

• 11:45am: Session 1 Papers

  • 11:45am: Professor Kath Bode, on the productive uses of LLMs in literary criticism

  • 12:10pm: Dr Professor Leah Hendrickson, on Digital AI Literacy

• 1:00pm: Lunch

• 2:00pm: Session 2 Papers

  • 2:00pm: Professor Chris Danta

  • 2:40pm: Dr Chris Conti

• 3:15pm: Finish

• 6:00pm: Dinner at the Lord Nelson Hotel

This event is of special interest to Western Sydney postgraduates in Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Media Studies. 

For further information regarding participation in the Thursday seminars and workshop presentation, contact Dr Christopher Conti (c.e.conti@westernsydney.edu.au).

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DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR LAUREN M. E. GOODLAD is chair of the Critical AI @ Rutgers and editor of Critical AI. Her work in critical AI studies and the teaching of critical AI literacies includes the editor's introduction to Critical AI, "Humanities in the Loop"; the introduction to DATA WORLDS (co-authored with Katherine Bode), the two-part special issue of Critical AI (with Mathew Stone) on Large Language Models, Generative AI, and the Rise of Chatbots (April and October 2024) and concerns the essential role of the humanities in promoting wider understanding of the social benefits and harms of AI tools in such initiative as the Design Justice Labs (https://criticalai.org/design-justice-labs/). Her forthcoming book ‘The Life Cycle of Writing Subjects: GenAI and the future of writing’. 

PROFESSOR KATHERINE BODE is the author or editor of books including A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (2018), Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field (2012), Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories (2014) and Resourceful Reading: The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Studies (2009) and co-editor of the inaugural special issue of Critical AI on "Data Worlds" (2023), the digital collection "To be continued: The Australian Newspaper Fiction Database" (2018-), and a special issue of Australian Literary Studies on "Reading" (2007). 

PROFESSOR CHRIS DANTA is the author of Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot (Bloomsbury, 2011) and Animal Fables after Darwin: Literature, Speciesism and Metaphor (Cambridge UP, 2018). He is currently working on an ARC Future Fellowship with the title Future Fables: Literature, Evolution and Artificial Intelligence. This project aims to understand (1) how the post-Darwin literary imagination has shaped our current anxieties about AI and (2) how literary and scientific writers after Darwin rethink the future of the human species by imagining the co-evolution of humans, animals and machines.

DR LEAH HENRICKSON is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Cultures at the University of Queensland. She is the author of Reading Computer-Generated Texts (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and other peer-reviewed articles about how we understand text generation systems and output, artificial intelligence, and digital media environments. She also studies digital storytelling for critical self-reflection, pedagogy, community building, and commercial benefit and is the author of Digital Storytelling: An Introduction (Polity, 2025)

DR CHRIS CONTI is a Senior Lecturer of Literary Studies at Western Sydney University who recently edited ‘AI and the Future of Literary Studies’ for Australian Literary Studies and ‘The Transdisciplinary Imperative’ for the Journal of Language, Literature and Culture.