Title: Where Artificial Intelligence and Fiction Meet
Speaker: Teresa Heffernan
When & Where: Monday, February 23, 2026 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm, Campbell Conference Facility, University of Toronto
More Information & Registration: https://www.humanities.utoronto.ca/events/where-artificial-intelligence-and-fiction-meet
Description: The Jackman Humanities Institute invites you to the 2026 Wiegand Memorial Foundation Lecture “Where Artificial Intelligence and Fiction Meet” and reception on Monday, February 23, 2026, with Teresa Heffernan, Professor of English at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax. The lecture will be moderated by Maurits van Bever Donker, Director of the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape.
Abstract: From Alan Turing and Samuel Butler to Peter Thiel and J.R.R. Tolkien to Demis Hassabis and Douglas Adams to Elon Musk and Gene Roddenberry, the fiction and science of artificial intelligence have long been entangled and conflated in the cultural imaginary. Obscuring the important social, political, and ethical questions these technologies raise, the AI industry co-opts fiction only to marginalize the literary imagination in discussions of a technological future. What are the costs of collapsing animals with machines? Of turning language into numbers? And why is this field steeped in orphic language? As the AI industry re-shapes knowledge, this talk considers what gets lost when the centuries old study of human society and culture is swallowed up by a very different type of knowledge generated algorithms, linear algebra, and statistics and why it is imperative to keep the tension between computation and languages alive.
