FYS 22 Artificial Intimacy: AI Companionship on Screen and in Everyday Life
Friendship, love, sex, therapy, mentorship, collaboration: these are just some of the relationships once reserved for other humans that are increasingly being demanded of AI systems. The question of what happens when we replace human relationships with machines isn’t new—the Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann was worrying about it in 1816—but it has never felt more timely. In this course, we will explore AI companionship as both a science fiction fantasy—in films such as Her, Ex Machina, and After Yang—and as a growing feature of everyday life, from chatbots and virtual assistants to humanoid robots. In addition to film, we will engage short stories, critical essays, and experimental interactions with different generative AI systems while discussing a broad range of issues, from the social and psychological to the political and environmental.
This is also a course about you, right now, as a first-year student at a particular moment in the history of thinking and writing. GenAI is reshaping how people read, analyze, and produce work in the classroom. We will address this head on as you complete a series of short papers over the course of the semester, while cultivating habits of mind for navigating a world in which the line between human and artificial keeps shifting.
Open only to first-year frosh.