Dr Reham Hosny

“Locked Up for Reading a Poem”: AI Poetics of Disguise and Literary Activism in the Arab World

The proposed project seeks to investigate the artificial intelligence (AI) potential to provide techniques and frameworks to underrepresented creative writers living under authoritarian regimes—Arab writers an example—to express political criticism of their regimes in literary texts without risking their lives. The AI poetics of disguise is introduced as an effective strategy to disguise political criticism in literature with the help of AI technology. I argue that using AI capabilities expands the conventional techniques of disguise and introduces innovative ones. This project’s methodology is based on investigating the most commonly used techniques of disguise in selected Arabic literary texts and the AI potential to go beyond such familiar techniques. Its critical orientation is grounded in social literary studies, digital media studies, gender studies and postcolonialism. The CFI at the University of Cambridge is the proposed research environment as a leading centre in researching the cultural and socio-political implications of AI.