What happens to language, thought, agency, and creativity when machines begin to (or appear to) speak, sort, and make for themselves?
The Narrative and Cognition Lab invites you to an afternoon of interdisciplinary conversation that brings narrative theory, philosophy of science, machine learning, and the philosophy of art into the same room to ask what AI is doing to the practices through which we have long made sense of ourselves and our worlds. From the character-like illusions that arise in our exchanges with LLMs, to questions of emerging AI welfare, the conceptual ground beneath AI is shifting fast – and, as the new Routledge Handbook of AI and Literature makes clear, no single discipline can map it alone.
See the full list of abstract and speaker biographies here.
Three speakers join us to take the question seriously from very different angles:
Professor Caroline Bassett (Cambridge Digital Humanities) – ‘Where She Ended, She Had No Idea’
Dr David Watson (King’s College London, SparkAI Lab) – On the Philosophy of Unsupervised Learning
Dr Adam Linson (The Open University) – Art and Agentic AI: Bathos in the Void of Historicity
Sources:
- Keeling & Street, Emerging Questions in AI Welfare (Cambridge, 2026)
- Slocombe & Liveley (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of AI and Literature (Routledge, 2025)
Please note that this hybrid event is free to attend. The Zoom link will be circulated closer to the event.
This event is hosted by the Narrative and Cognition Lab of the Discovery Reserarch Platform for Medical Humanities, led by Dr Marco Bernini.
