This article examines the methodological transformation that AI’s entry into literary criticism has set in motion. This transformation proceeds along four interrelated dimensions—technological capacity, critical method, literary ontology, and paradigm formation—that do not unfold in linear sequence but are mutually constitutive. At the technological level, the shift from machine reading to AI reading has given literary studies a new capacity for large-scale semantic analysis, though a qualitative gap persists between AI “reading” and human reading. At the methodological level, computational analysis has expanded the scale and verifiability of criticism without being equivalent to “objectivity”; its value lies in rendering the research process more transparent and reproducible. At the ontological level, generative AI poses substantive challenges to such core categories as “author,” “text,” and “literariness,” yet this disruption extends, rather than originates, the destabilizing work already undertaken by twentieth-century literary theory. Building on these three interconnected transformations, the article proposes the paradigm of computational literary criticism,” distinguishing it from Franco Moretti’s “distant reading,” Matthew Jockers’s “macroanalysis, and the broader field of digital humanities. The article argues that the core value of computational literary criticism lies not in replacing interpretation with computation, but in constructing a collaborative framework of sustained interaction between computational discovery and humanistic interpretation—a framework whose viability depends on methodological self-discipline, data ethical awareness, and an unwavering attentiveness to the humanistic core of literary inquiry.

Ethical Literary Criticism, founded by Chinese scholars, is a critical theory and methodology for reading and interpreting literary works from the perspective of ethics. Its central concept, ethical choice, operates under new conditions in the age of artificial intelligence. AI systems intervene deeply in human cognition and affect ethical choice by altering its cognitive conditions. Cognitive ethics is a critical concept advanced within Ethical Literary Criticism to examine the internal connection between cognition and ethics. Viewed through the lens of cognitive ethics, AI systems intervene in all three stages of ethical choice. At the stage of perception, the information a person relies on has already been filtered by the systems. At the stage of weighing, ethical considerations that resist quantification are either converted into numerical values or excluded. At the stage of decision, ethical choice no longer occurs in the concrete situation but has already occurred at the point of system design. Ethical choice accordingly takes on new characteristics, namely mediation, the dispersal of responsibility, and task-orientation. Ethical wisdom therefore comes to include metacognitive capacity, and it reaffirms ethical choice as a practical activity that advances moral cultivation.

This paper examines contemporary society through the concept of algorithmic hyper-late modernity, a new phase emerging from the convergence of digital technologies and global mobilities. Rather than viewing the digital revolution as a purely technological development, it conceptualizes it as a profound transformation of social systems, everyday life, and modes of human existence. Drawing on both classical and contemporary sociological theory, the paper situates this transformation in relation to earlier phases of modernity and late modernity, engaging with thinkers such as Durkheim, Giddens, Jameson, and Elliott. It further analyzes how social media platforms, algorithmic infrastructures, and artificial intelligence increasingly mediate political processes, public opinion, affective dynamics, and risk. The paper also advances the concept of Mobilities 3.0 to describe a condition in which mobility becomes deeply entangled with digital systems, generating algorithmic forms of movement, communication, subjectivity, and governance that operate across national borders. The paper concludes by arguing that human life is now constituted within networks linking humans and technologies, rather than in opposition to them. In this context, the humanities play a crucial role in critically reflecting on these transformations and in articulating ethical boundaries for human life in the age of artificial intelligence.

Citations

• GENAI, PROTEST, AND PUBLIC DISCOURSE: THE ROLE OF THE HUMANITIES IN RESISTING SLOPAGANDA
  Sarah Eilefson
  Journal of Humanities and AI.2026; 1(2): 18.     CrossRef
• Algorithmic mobilities and tourism geographies: movement, agency and power in hyper-late modernity
  Hideki Endo
  Tourism Geographies.2026; 28(4): 916.     CrossRef

AI-generated memetic warfare uses the appeal of memes and the distributive power of social media to reach and influence a wide audience, a tactic seen widely used in the first few months of the 2026 conflict among Iran and Israel and the United States. By analyzing a series of viral videos generated in the same style as the Lego Movie franchise in support of Iran, this paper explores the implications of this new technology on the way we wage war as well as on global economies, the environment, and societal health. I examine the distinctions among propaganda, “slopaganda,” and legitimate protest as well as the relationship between propaganda and social media platforms. I suggest how the humanities may serve not only to resist the unwanted effects of propaganda but also to engender the more desirable empathetic identification and understanding of legitimate protesters, no matter the media they use to draw attention to their cause.