Nina Beguš

She coined "artificial humanities" — reading AI through literature, myth and power.

Literary, critical, precise. Makes the tired conversation about AI and bias interesting again.

Nina Beguš is a researcher at UC Berkeley and the author of Artificial Humanities, which named the field and won an Artificiality Institute Award. Her method is to read AI the way a scholar reads a text, using literary, historical and philosophical tools to interpret what these systems are and what we load onto them. She traces a single long lineage from Pygmalion through Eliza Doolittle to Weizenbaum's ELIZA and today's language models — four hundred years of stories about making a mind, and about who gets counted as one.

When Siri arrived as a feminized assistant designed to build rapport, her first question was simply: why is it a woman? The answer runs back through centuries of fiction that shaped the product before any engineer touched it.

Her contribution to Unknowing lands at the most personal scale. We are always inside the system we are trying to interpret, and the interpreter is being reshaped by the thing she interprets while she interprets it.

You'll take away: a way to notice what is happening to you. Spend time with Nina and you start catching the moment your own judgment shifts to match the tool — which is the only reliable defense against it. Useful for anyone writing, hiring, teaching or building with these systems daily.

ONE WATCH OR LISTEN — "Nina Beguš: Artificial Humanities," Artificiality. Our conversation on fiction as the blueprint for the technology.