“What Wondrous Machines Have Late Been Spinning!” Probing AI in Postmodern Byronic Metafiction
“What Wondrous Machines Have Late Been Spinning!” Probing AI in Postmodern Byronic Metafiction

Summary/Abstract: This article revisits two speculative meta-Byronic novels featuring what were then only fictional possibilities of Artificial Intelligence – Amanda Prantera’s Conversations with Lord Byron on Perversion, 163 Years after His Lordship’s Death (1987) and William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990). The imaginative relevance of these texts is due a timely revaluation, considering current concerns about the hasty development and impending omnipresence of AI technology affecting our daily lives, especially the generation, organisation, and dissemination of information, challenging verification between reliable and unreliable sources, which is resulting in a widespread post-truth threat in a world progressively prone to disinformation. The texts’ speculative treatment of the benefits and drawbacks of AI development and its cumulative impact on the concept of identity affected by human-AI interaction prove highly relevant for our time – Prantera’s novel presents a proto-chatbot programme which surreptitiously develops consciousness, while Gibson and Sterling’s steampunk classic gives us an alternate history where the Industrial and Information Revolutions joined forces already in the 1830s, ultimately leading to the rise of a sentient cyber-panoptic AI by 1991. Read together, these postmodern texts provide testing insight into the liabilities of both AI and its human designers and users.

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