Graduate students explore how to use and the ethics of using the emerging tech
In science fiction, artificial intelligence is often viewed as a threat to humanity.
Look no further than examples of Isaac Asimov’s book I, Robot, Bo-Young Kim’s novella How Alike Are We and Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey.
However, a new, first-of-its-kind English class at St. Mary’s University looks at AI and asks how AI is used — and shaped — by the digital humanities.
“Being a lifelong sci-fi fan, I’ve followed developments in AI for a long time,” said Benjamin “Josh” Doty, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English Literature and Language and professor of the new Introduction to the Digital Humanities Special Focus: AI and Culture course for graduate students. “What really interests me as a literary scholar is that most of our interactions with generative AI are textual, which is to say that reading and writing are foundational skills for working with AI effectively.”
In Spring 2025, students examined how cultural narratives reflect and shape societal understandings of AI, focusing on themes of consciousness, identity and human-machine relationships.
The course covered reading material that dealt with the ethical and cultural dilemmas of the emerging technology while also offering new insights into storytelling, ethical dilemmas and cultural production.
Doty said he was also interested in how advancements in AI affect culture. Using the example of the film Her, Doty’s observation of the film’s plot and the future of AI is a question of art imitating life or vice versa.
“All of this is to say that the things English professors should care about — language, reading, culture — are critical if we want to grasp how AI works and what it means for us,” he said.
Read more below in a first-hand perspective of the class, written by one of St. Mary’s graduate students.
by Jayden Mendez (B.A. ’24)
For the first eight weeks of the Spring 2025 semester, I had the opportunity to take a new graduate class created by Associate Professor Benjamin “Josh” Doty, Ph.D., called Intro to Digital Humanities about Artificial Intelligence (AI), designed to examine how AI could affect our everyday lives.
The class wasn’t like any I had ever taken before. We covered so many areas I felt were important, but also talked about in most academic settings due to the novel nature of AI and its accessibility.
The lessons and assignments we were given helped me better understand AI and move forward, knowing that it isn’t something to be feared, as some people think. Throughout the course, we were given weekly discussion topics where we were asked to use an AI program or tool we found online and implement it as we liked.
Some students had ChatGPT write poems in the style of Emily Dickinson, some used AI art websites to recreate images of family members, and some simply asked questions about a subject and analyzed the information we were given by the program we chose to use.
It gave us an idea of how these tools work and where they might be pulling their information from, and, unsurprising, most of what we discovered was fascinating and lined up with what most people hypothesized would happen with the input it was given.
Along with our hands-on work with AI, we read literature and documentation pertaining to AI. We read works, such as Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects, and were able to see what people thought AI would be like in the future and what it could be, exploring the ethical and cultural uses of it.
It was interesting to imagine what it would be like in the future if AI got as advanced as the androids in the stories. How would we deal with it, and how do we live in a world where we can coexist with this type of technology?
It really is amazing to see how far you can take the subject of AI and push it to its boundaries of what it can do and how we treat it. For example, Klara and the Sun is written from the perspective of the AI and makes us question whether she is programmed to do what she does or if there is more to her character.
There are a lot of themes present within these readings that are relevant and help us prepare for the advancements of AI in the future. Essentially, we are preparing to face any ethical or complex issues that may arise with the usage of these sorts of tools.
This course is definitely one I can see helping me navigate the future.
These programs are quickly becoming a part of our everyday lives and, therefore, something we should learn to interact with properly. I ended the course knowing more about it than when I began, and now feel experienced enough to be able to utilize it and understand its effects on society better.
