Attending to the Genre in Generative AI

Most discussion of generative AI (GenAI) in the context of humanities pedagogy has circled around concerns about plagiarism and threats to student creativity (e.g. Haslam 2024), with relatively little evidence of engagement with the potential use of GenAI in the literary studies classroom (cf. O’Halloran 2024). In this short paper, I will outline an application of GenAI that opens up new avenues for infusing artificial intelligence into humanities teaching, along with a fresh perspective for thinking critically about GenAI itself (see Raley et al. 2023). Algorithmically produced text output by GenAIs based on Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT commonly strikes human readers as generic (Hadan et al. 2024), which has prompted Ilana Gershon to argue that rather than ‘language machines,’ LLM based GenAIs should be understood as ‘genre machines’ (2023, 115). I propose that this apparent bug can be put to use as a feature in the context of humanities education. Prompting GenAI to generate output in a certain literary genre reliably produces text that contains the typical features of a literary genre such as Romantic or modernist poetry in generic, that is, rather crude and obvious form. Exercises that involve generating such output and comparing it to human-produced works of art usually assumed to belong to the genre in question achieve two interlocking pedagogical goals. First, they prompt students to evaluate the output produced by GenAI, contributing to developing their critical digital literacy (Pangrazio 2016). Second, students learn to question the validity of the individualistic models of authorship and creativity that underlie common current-day assumptions about artistic creation. That critical perspective, in turn, allows for a critical re-evaluation of the ‘generic’ output of GenAI in light of how GenAI creates meaning in various forms of cooperation with, rather than independent of, human beings (cf. Danesi 2024).
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References:

Danesi, Marcel. AI-Generated Popular Culture: A Semiotic Perspective. Springer Nature, 2024.

Gershon, Ilana. "Bullshit Genres: What to Watch for When Studying the New Actant ChatGPT and Its Siblings." Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 47.3 (2023): 115-131.

Hadan, Hilda, et al. "The Great AI Witch Hunt: Reviewers Perception and (Mis) Conception of Generative AI in Research Writing." arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.12015 (2024).

Haslam, Richard J. "“This Wonderful Machine”: How Should We Teach Humanities Texts like Gulliver’s Travels in the Time of ChatGPT?." Critical Humanities 2.2 (2024): 4.

O'Halloran, Kieran. "Digital assemblages with AI for creative interpretation of short stories." Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 39.2 (2024): 657-689.

Raley, Rita, and Jennifer Rhee. "Critical AI: A field in formation." American Literature 95.2 (2023): 185-204.