30/07/2026
AIMODELS proudly announces a new symposium!
Call for papers deadline: 15 August 2026.
Adversarial Poetry
Critical Humanities and the Limits of Artificial Intelligence
Symposium, 1-2 October 2026, Venice
What is the place of poetry in a world dominated by AI and the automation of language? The Italian semiotician Umberto Eco once argued that “no algorithm exists for the metaphor”, suggesting that the limits of AI and computation in general are precisely marked by poetry as disruption of code. Can AI, then, generate poetry? Eco was referring to symbolic AI, grounded in deductive inference, whereas large language models (LLMs) operate today on inductive inference, which at scale exhibits astonishing performances in language competences and in detecting high-order conceptual abstractions such as style, for instance. Yet the same argument holds for deductive and inductive machines alike. Poetry, as Charles Sanders Peirce would argue, follows neither the rules of deductive nor inductive reasoning, rather it constitutes the breaking of such rules, as in abductive reasoning, in which one envisions a new world and invents new language for it.
The symposium revisits the traditions of avantgarde poetry that experimented with algorithms to contest the politics of authorship and creativity over the last century. It investigates the disruptive power of poetry and the limits of contemporary AI, exploring the contribution that the humanities bring to a world marked by the rising hegemony of computer science in cultural heritage. The symposium takes as its starting point the remarkable findings of Icaro Lab, which demonstrated the use of poetry to jailbreak the security of AI models. Ultimately, it programmatically reclaims a new role for the critical humanities in AI literacy and STEM disciplines.
The symposium is organised by the ERC project AIMODELS, Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, in partnership with Icaro Foundation, Rome.
Image: Mirella Bentivoglio, E=congiunzione (And=Conjunction), 1973
Courtesy Archivio Mirella Bentivoglio
For more information,
email: [email protected]
unive.it/adversarialpoetry
