Stay Human, from the Artificiality Institute

Nina Beguš: Artificial Humanities

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Mar 28, 2026

Nina Beguš, UC Berkeley researcher and author exploring literature, language, and technology. She traces the Pygmalion template shaping virtual assistants. She discusses the ELIZA effect and how language use by machines alters who gets to speak. She outlines projects with writers, latent-space experiments, and a planetary view linking humans, nature, and technology.

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INSIGHT

Fictional Scripts Shape Real AI Design

Fictional scripts deeply shape how people design and feel about AI interfaces.
Nina Beguš traced Siri, Her, and Ex Machina back to cultural narratives that made assistants into relational, gendered figures.

ANECDOTE

Humanities Consulting Won Over Tech Teams

Beguš worked as a humanistic consultant in industry and found technologists valued humanities insights.
That practical experience convinced her the artificial humanities approach was useful and marketable.

ADVICE

Embed Humanities At The Center Of AI Projects

Build humanities into the center of AI development through collaboration not as an afterthought.
Nina calls for 'artificial humanities' to pair interpretative work with design, intervention, policy, and education.

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In this conversation, we explore the cultural foundations of artificial intelligence with Nina Beguš, Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley and author of "Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI." Nina makes a compelling case for an entirely new field—one that brings humanistic insights into the very creation of technology rather than treating humanities as critical afterthought or ethical guardrail.

Nina's work emerged from recognizing patterns everywhere she looked: the same fictional scripts appearing in technology products, films, and Silicon Valley's imagination. When Siri launched as a feminized virtual assistant designed to build rapport, Nina immediately asked "why is it a woman?" and began tracing how deeply fiction shapes our technological reality—not as metaphor but as blueprint.

Key themes we explore:

The Pygmalion Template: How an ancient myth—male creator produces idealized woman, projects desire onto creation—persistently shapes virtual assistants and AI interfaces
From Marble to Cockney to LLMs: Tracing evolution from Ovid through Shaw's "Pygmalion" to the "ELIZA effect" named after Eliza Doolittle
Language No Longer Uniquely Human: The profound implications of machines using language eloquently without consciousness
Monolingual AI at Global Scale: How tokenization creates structural monolingualism beyond just favoring English
Writers Responding to AI: Nina's project gathering sixteen writers to reflect on what happens when language is no longer exclusively human
Planetary Ontology: Collaborative work seeing human/nature/technology as sitting "in the same continuum of this planet"

Nina Beguš is Researcher and Lecturer at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society at the University of California, Berkeley. She graduated with a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University. During her time at the Berggruen Institute and ToftH, she helped implement novel humanities-based consulting techniques for big tech companies.

https://www.ninabegus.com