Artificial Intelligence and Literary Analyses: Challenges and Prospects

Abstract

Whilst contemporary trends and developments in the areas of web-based facilities and
artificial intelligence (AI) solutions have opened an interesting vista of a mechanised
world of literary analysis, there is need to ask whether they can also effectively and
creatively deliver useful insights on new ways to interpret literary texts. Beyond quantum
analyses of patterns and relationships between events, machinesmight not be accurately
configured and trained to match human cognition as well as behave like skilled analysts
in the understanding and interpretation of feelings, body-language, emotions and
atmosphere of literary texts. Using five excerpts from Chinua Achebe’sThings Fall Apart
and two Natural Language Processing tools (NLP), this paper explores the challenges
and prospects of AI. It focuses on how innovative literary digital aid can effectively and
successfully be applied and implemented in literary analysis without reducing the art of
creative imagination/reasoning to mere literary calculus. It posits that developing
specialised metrics for analyzing fiction—a unique package of automated computational
solution or programming that will be suited to qualitative assessment of fictional texts—
might be a risk the creative literary analyst may be willing to take by subjecting literary
texts to the power of machine interpretation(s). Hence, while AI may offer interesting
potential for assessing quantum data in some literary texts, however, acceding to
unrestricted digital solutions may undermine the human creative imagination, as analysis
might tend more towards calculus and algorithm-friendly systematic literary output.
Thus, for now, the full impact or significance of AI solutionsfor literary analysesis yet to
be detained.