September 30, 2025
AI and literature at the European Beat Studies Network Conference
Davis Schneiderman, Executive Director of the Krebs Center for the Humanities and Professor of English at Lake Forest College, presented his recent research at the European Beat Studies Network’s 2025 conference in Hildesheim, Germany.
His talk, “The Soft Machine Learns? William S. Burroughs, Counterculture, and the ‘Prophetic’ Vision of AI,” connected mid-20th-century texts by Burroughs to today’s urgent questions about artificial intelligence.
Drawing from his recent essay, “The Electronic Revolutionary: Artificial Intelligence and Fake News,” to be included in William Burroughs in Context, a forthcoming collection of essays Schneiderman is co-editing for Cambridge University Press, he argued that three Burroughs texts serve as a “Playback Trilogy.” These works—The Job (1970), Electronic Revolution (1971), and The Revised Boy Scout Manual (2018)—show how tape recorders, media manipulation, and language experiments anticipated the ways generative AI can manipulate language, distort truth, and undermine human agency.
“Students see firsthand how technology reshapes language, culture, and human agency.”
Schneiderman regularly brings these questions into his classroom at Lake Forest College, where he teaches courses on artificial intelligence, digital humanities, and experimental literature, and where the study of artificial intelligence is a key part of his work. “Mid 20th-century visions of media control aren’t just history—they’re alive in today’s AI. Students see firsthand how technology reshapes language, culture, and human agency,” said Schneiderman.
Central to Schneiderman’s talk was the concept of emergence—the unpredictable behaviors that arise when complex systems interact, and he linked Burroughs’ media experiments to contemporary technologies such as deepfakes, algorithmic recommendation systems, and chatbot failures. He placed Burroughs in dialogue with other thinkers, including Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics, who warned that feedback loops in machines could escape human oversight.
The presentation drew strong discussion among international scholars, underscoring Lake Forest College’s role in global conversations about literature, technology, and ethics. A long-time Burroughs scholar and member of the EBSN, Schneiderman also chaired a panel on avant-garde poetics and read from his creative work at an evening event.