Humanities in the Age of AI

Instructor: Dr. Anastasia Salter
Office Hours: Wednesdays 11AM - 1:30PM, TCH 236 and/or Zoom
Course Number: ENG 6806
Email: anastasia at ucf

Contents
Course Description
Course Objectives
Materials and Texts
Required Subscriptions
Evaluation and Grading
Asynchronous Online Course Structure
Weekly Schedule

Course Description

This course offers an exploration of the theory and practice of artificial intelligence and its use in textual, visual, and procedural arts and humanities work, framed through Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995) and the questions it raises about minds, bodies, and agents made of code. Across the semester we return to one central, unresolved tension: the ghost (the mind, the voice, the claim to authorship) versus the shell (the body, the medium, the interface that carries it). The course is divided into three units built around this frame, engaging with both creative examples and theoretical critiques of AI’s use in the arts and humanities:

Ghosts. In this textual unit, we consider the history of textual generation and analysis, asking what it means to locate a “ghost” – a voice, an author, a mind – inside generated text, with attention to both the exploitation of and applications for archives, literature, and historical work. Students will engage in textual generation and textual analysis.
Shells. In this visual unit, we explore visual generation and its challenges for authorship and meaning – the “shell” as body, image, and interface – with attention to parallel discussions in modern and postmodern media. Students will engage in generation for both visual material and image-texts and consider the changing perspectives on artists and creativity.
Puppet Masters. In this procedural-agentic unit, we dive into the layer of code and the rise of the AI agent: a figure, like the Puppet Master of the film, born in a sea of information, acting with increasing autonomy across our systems. With attention to the history of generative practices in both electronic literature and digital humanities usage, students will co-author code and interactive projects with AI models and agents, focusing on use cases for libraries, archives, museums, and artistic expression.

The final module, “The Net Is Vast and Infinite,” takes its name from the film’s closing line and looks toward the future impacts of these tools and the ways we might work with human imagination toward solving arts and humanities problems – and toward a final reflection on where the ghost ends and the shell begins. Each week, plan on following the module for all asynchronous activities. Each module will be divided into three sections:

Weekly Readings. Complete this combination of primary and secondary texts prior to starting the making exercise. The full schedule of required readings is listed in the syllabus: additional recommended readings will be provided in each module.
Exercises. Each week’s exercise will involve experimenting with and reflecting upon generative AI tools in different contexts. Most will use the required Anthropic subscription, but some other free tools or trials will be recommended throughout.
Reflective Discussion. A weekly online discussion will provide the opportunity to share the process of each exercise: the emphasis is not on “success” or “failure,” but on critiquing the process and products through a theoretical lens.

Course Objectives

Engage in both critical and creative projects exploring the pitfalls and potentials of large language models in visual, textual, and procedural work
Understand the history and implications of computer-augmentation across the arts and humanities
Make connections between contemporary policies around AI and past debates and perspectives on other technologies
Use large datasets to solve problems in the arts and humanities, with attention to evaluating and critiquing these methods alongside more traditional approaches in these disciplines
Use and analyze the application of AI generative methods for textual, visual, and procedural work.
Critique policies and uses of AI in various communities and contexts (the workplace, academia, etc.)

Materials and Texts

This course requires a mix of applied and theoretical readings, including some open access materials. The primary texts include:

Melanie Mitchell. Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). (Physical copy on reserve in the UCF Library)
Safiya Noble. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. (NYU Press, 2018). Unlimited Access Ebook via UCF Library
Emily Bender and Alex Hanna. The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want (Beacon Press, 2024).
Josh Tyrangiel. AI for Good: How Real People Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Things That Matter (Simon & Schuster, 2026).

In addition, each module includes samples, tutorials, and resources to guide the week’s making experiments. Relevant recent articles will be integrated regularly to encourage awareness of the current discourse and the field.

Required Viewing:

Mamoru Oshii, dir. Ghost in the Shell (1995). As of August 2026: free with ads on Tubi and Plex, also available via Hoopla (free with a public library card); streaming on Prime Video, Hulu, and Netflix; available for rental on Apple TV and Amazon. Please check current availability, as streaming rights change.

Recommended ongoing viewing:

Science SARU’s The Ghost in the Shell (2026), streaming on Prime Video, with new episodes airing during the semester. This new adaptation is not required, but offers a running point of comparison to the 1995 film throughout the term.

Required Subscriptions

Students will need to subscribe to Anthropic’s Claude for hands-on exercises throughout the semester. A paid subscription is required to access the full functionality needed for course assignments.

Evaluation and Grading

Points	Assignment Summary	Due Date
6	Activity Verification - Complete the brief survey posted on Webcourses as soon as possible to confirm your enrollment in the course. As this is required by the university, please attend to it as soon as possible at the start of classes.	Friday, August 28
78	Exercises - Weekly discussions will consist of making, sharing, and reflecting on the process of exploring. We will work from tutorials and try a new form every week, with reflective questions connecting our process of making to the theoretical frameworks and provocations offered by our readings (13 exercises, 6 points each).	Weekly
16	Final Reflection - During the final exam period, students will share a final 750 - 1000 word reflective blog post on their journey, with particular consideration to next steps and the future of the technologies explored throughout the semester.	Thursday, December 10

Students can access their grades and feedback at any time using the Grade Book function of Webcourses. All assignments will be submitted through Webcourses. Plan on checking the site at least twice a week for updates and assignment information. Grades are calculated out of 100 following a standard letter scale.

Late work is accepted without penalty for one week after the listed deadline. If circumstances require extension beyond that deadline, please reach out to the instructor immediately.

There is an extra credit making exercise available in Week 14 (“The Net Is Vast and Infinite” – Custom Bots) for those who miss a week or want to push further with agentic tools: up to 6 points for building and sharing a custom Claude Skill, up to 6 points for building and sharing a subagent workflow, and up to 10 points for fine-tuning a small model on the semester’s public-domain corpus. Grades will be available through Webcourses and updated weekly.

Withdrawal Deadline: The university withdrawal deadline for this course is Friday, October 30, 2026. Please review UCF’s withdrawal policy and reach out to the instructor as soon as possible if you are considering withdrawing.

Asynchronous Online Course Structure

This course uses a fully asynchronous online format, and relies upon students to complete all readings, engage with both course lectures and other online videos, and join in on course discussions. All assignments are due the Sunday of their listed module, but will be accepted with no penalty for one week before closing. Once an assignment closes, late work will not be accepted unless an additional extension has already been approved by the instructor: please reach out early if circumstances will require additional time!

The course has no synchronous meeting requirements and operates entirely asynchronously.
Office hour assistance is available both through text on Webcourses messages and via Zoom: Zoom is recommended for advanced technical problems, where screen-sharing might be helpful to resolving errors.
Students will need access to a reliable internet connection and computer to participate in this course. Due to some of the AI tool installation needs, administrative access to the system is required to complete assignments.
In the event of an emergency or medical challenge, additional flexibility beyond the grading guidelines is available: when anticipated, students should reach out to the instructor as soon as feasible to form a plan or discuss an incomplete if needed.

Weekly Schedule

Classes run from Monday, August 24 through Thursday, December 3, 2026, with the final exam period running December 4 - 10. Weekly modules open on Mondays and close the following Sunday: because this course is asynchronous with Sunday deadlines, the last module’s work (Week Fourteen, extra credit) is due Sunday, December 6, and the Final Reflection is due during the exam period on Thursday, December 10.

Week One: Ghosts - Histories (Monday, August 24 - Sunday, August 30)

Slides: Week One
Artificial Intelligence - Part I: Background
The AI Con - Chapter 1: An Introduction to AI Hype
Berry, D. M. (2023). The Limits of Computation: Joseph Weizenbaum and the ELIZA Chatbot. Weizenbaum Journal of the Digital Society, 3(3). https://doi.org/10.34669/WI.WJDS/3.3.2
DeLoach, Brian, and Savannah Welch. “Thirty Years Later: Sacred Scripture, Ghost in the Shell, and Our Lady of Perpetual Cyberpunk.” SFRA Review (January 22, 2025).
Due: Activity Verification (Friday, August 28)
Exercise: ELIZA and Ghosts

Week Two: Ghosts - Generation (Monday, August 31 - Sunday, September 6)

Slides: Week Two
Artificial Intelligence - Part II: Looking and Seeing
The AI Con - Chapter 2: It’s Alive! The Hype of Thinking Machines
Emerson, Lori, ‘Interfaced’, in Matthew Rubery, and Leah Price (eds), Further Reading (2020; online edn, Oxford Academic, 5 Mar. 2020).
Underwood, Ted. “A more interesting upside of AI.” July 2, 2025.
Exercise: Generation and Interfaces

Week Three: Ghosts - Sources (Monday, September 7 - Sunday, September 13)

Slides: Week Three
Artificial Intelligence - Part III: Learning to Play
The AI Con - Chapter 3: Leisure for Me, Gig Work for Thee: AI Hype at Work
Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “Prepare for the Textpocalypse.” The Atlantic. March 8, 2023.
Hao, Karen. “Inside the story that enraged OpenAI.” MIT Technology Review. May 19, 2025.
Note: Monday, September 7 is Labor Day. The university holiday does not pause this asynchronous module – coursework and discussion continue as usual.
Exercise: Research and Sources

Week Four: Ghosts - Reading (Monday, September 14 - Sunday, September 20)

Slides: Week Four
Artificial Intelligence - Part IV: Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Language
The AI Con - Chapter 4: If It Quacks Like a Doc: AI Hype and Social Services
Algorithms of Oppression - The Power of Algorithms
Underwood, Ted. “A Genealogy of Distant Reading.” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 11.2 (2017). http://digitalhumanities.org:8081/dhq/vol/11/2/000317/000317.html.
Bamman, David, Ted Underwood, and Noah A. Smith. “The Literary Canons of Large-Language Models.” Proceedings of NLP4DH 2025 (February 2025).
Exercise: Reading Across Texts

Week Five: Shells - Aesthetics (Monday, September 21 - Sunday, September 27)

Slides: Week Five
Artificial Intelligence - Part V: The Barrier of Meaning
The AI Con - Chapter 5: Artifice or Intelligence? AI Hype in Art, Journalism, and Science
Algorithms of Oppression - A Society; Searching
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto” (excerpt).
Demsky, Ian. “My Month with Midjourney.” Electronic Book Review. April 2, 2023.
Exercise: Image Generation

Week Six: Shells - Art and Creativity (Monday, September 28 - Sunday, October 4)

Slides: Week Six
The AI Con - Chapter 6: I’m Sorry, Dave, I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That: AI Doomers, AI Boosters, and Why None of That Makes Sense
Algorithms of Oppression - Searching for Black Girls
Jebb, Louis. “On process: Refik Anadol seeks to demystify AI art by showing how it is put together.” The Art Newspaper. April 5, 2024.
Recommended (optional; PDF in Webcourses): Menotti, Gabriel. “The model is the museum: generative AI and the expropriation of cultural heritage.” AI & Society (2025).
Exercise: Archival Images

Week Seven: Shells - Video and Realism (Monday, October 5 - Sunday, October 11)

Slides: Week Seven
The AI Con - Chapter 7: Do You Believe in Hope After Hype?
Algorithms of Oppression - Future of Knowledge in Public
Google DeepMind. “Veo 3.1.”
“AI & the Film Industry: Production.” Tech Policy @ Duke Sanford.
Framing note: OpenAI’s Sora was discontinued in 2026 (the app and web experience closed April 26, 2026). Consider its rapid rise and shutdown alongside Veo 3.1 as a hype-cycle case study for this week’s Chapter 7 reading.
Exercise: Video

Week Eight: Shells - Perceptions (Monday, October 12 - Sunday, October 18)

Slides: Week Eight
Algorithms of Oppression - Future of Information Culture; Conclusion
Farrell, Henry. “After software eats the world, what comes out the other end?” October 3, 2024.
404 Media. “Pinterest Is Drowning in a Sea of AI Slop and Auto-Moderation.” February 2026.
404 Media. “Where Facebook’s AI Slop Comes From.”
Exercise: Images as Information

Week Nine: Puppet Masters - Distant Coding (Monday, October 19 - Sunday, October 25)

Slides: Week Nine
AI for Good - Introduction and Chapter 1: “I Believe the Children Are Our Future”
Evans, Julia. So you want to be a wizard.
Willison, Simon. “Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code.” March 11, 2025.
Exercise: Distant Coding

Week Ten: Puppet Masters - Building and Deploying (Monday, October 26 - Sunday, November 1)

Slides: Week Ten
AI for Good - Chapter 2: “Physician Heal Thyself”
Willison, Simon. “Vibe engineering.” October 7, 2025. (Willison flags “agentic engineering” as the settling term for this concept – we’ll discuss both.)
Exercise: Building and Deploying

Week Eleven: Puppet Masters - Agentic Code (Monday, November 2 - Sunday, November 8)

Slides: Week Eleven
AI for Good - Chapter 3: “A Republic If You Can Optimize”
Willison, Simon. “Designing agentic loops.” September 30, 2025.
Martin, Meredith. “Command Lines for the Humanities.” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. 2024;139(3):541-547. doi:10.1632/S0030812924000555
Exercise: Agentic Code

Week Twelve: Puppet Masters - Local Ghosts (Monday, November 9 - Sunday, November 15)

Slides: Week Twelve
AI for Good - Chapter 4: “Only Connect”
Willison, Simon. “The lethal trifecta for AI agents: private data, untrusted content, and external communication.” June 16, 2025.
DeepSeek-R1 model card.
Exercise: Local Models

Week Thirteen: Puppet Masters - Distant Reading with and for AI (Monday, November 16 - Sunday, November 22)

Slides: Week Thirteen
AI for Good - Epilogue
“Generative AI & Fictionality: How Novels Power Large Language Models.” arXiv:2603.01220 (2026).
“AI as a Tool for Simulation-Based Experiments in Literary Studies.” arXiv:2606.02293 (2026).
Due Sunday, November 22 – before Thanksgiving break.
Exercise: Distant Reading with and for AI

Thanksgiving Break (No Module, November 23 - 27)

No module this week – enjoy the Thanksgiving break! There is no new reading, exercise, or discussion due during this week.

Week Fourteen: The Net Is Vast and Infinite - Custom Bots (Extra Credit, Monday, November 30 - Sunday, December 6)

Slides: Week Fourteen

This coda module is extra credit only and carries no new AI for Good chapter – instead, revisit the Introduction and Epilogue alongside our ELIZA and Puppet Master callbacks from earlier in the semester, working with the “Ghosts Before the Shell” public-domain corpus: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Gutenberg #41445), Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (Gutenberg #59112), Thea von Harbou’s Metropolis (Gutenberg #73727), Ambrose Bierce’s “Moxon’s Master” (in Can Such Things Be?, Gutenberg #4366), E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sand-Man” (in Weird Tales, Vol. 1, Gutenberg #31377), and Edward S. Ellis’s The Huge Hunter; or, The Steam Man of the Prairies (Gutenberg #7506).

Extra Credit Exercise: Custom Bots – choose one or more tiers: build and share a custom Claude Skill (up to 6 points), build and share a subagent workflow (up to 6 points), or fine-tune a small model on the corpus above (up to 10 points).

Final Reflection (Due Thursday, December 10)

Submit & complete your Final Reflection, as well as any approved late work, by Thursday, December 10th!

Contents