Literature as an Ethical Laboratory: AI and YA Literature

Meet our Contributor: Melanie Hundley

Dr. Melanie Hundley is a Professor in the Practice of English Education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College; her research examines how AI, digital and multimodal composition informs the development of pre-service teachers’ writing pedagogy.  Additionally, she explores the use of AI, digital and social media in young adult literature.  She teaches writing methods courses that focus on AI, digital and multimodal composition and young adult literature courses that explore diversity, culture, and storytelling in young adult texts. 

She teaches AI and literacy courses including AI and Storytelling. Her current research focus has three strands: AI in writing, AI in Teacher Education, and Verse Novels in Young Adult Literature She is currently the Coordinator of the Secondary Education English Education program in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College.

Literature as an Ethical Laboratory: AI and YA Literature
by Melanie Hundley

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about literature as an ethical laboratory, a place where we get to try out big ideas, test possibilities, and ask the kinds of “what if” questions that don’t have easy answers. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that we’ve been doing this for a very long time.  We imagine things that confuse us, scare us, or make us wonder in story. We record ideas, represent moments, document our history, in narrative. And maybe none of this is surprising, because—as Will Storr reminds us—storytelling is how we make sense of everything:

“We experience our day-to-day lives in story mode. The brain creates a world for us to live in and populates it with allies and villains… Story is what brain does. It is a ‘story processor’…not a logic processor.”
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—Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling

If our brains are wired for story, then it makes sense that when we encounter something as complex and uncertain as technology, we turn it into narrative. We imagine it. We test it. We ask: What if?  And then we play out that what if to see where it can take us, our thinking, our imagination.   

Long before algorithms and artificial intelligence, stories were already imagining artificial life, powerful creations, and the consequences of human ambition. In Greek mythology, Talos, the bronze giant who protected Crete, was essentially an ancient robot, programmed to defend, but capable of destruction. Hephaestus, the god of invention, crafted mechanical servants who could think and move on their own, blurring the line between tool and life. He also created Pandora at Zeus’s command—fashioning her as the first woman, whose existence and actions would unleash unforeseen consequences on the world. Her story becomes one of the earliest cautionary tales about creation, control, and what happens when something powerful is brought into being without fully understanding its impact.

We see similar questions echoed across cultures and time. In The Story of the City of Brass from The Thousand and One Nights, travelers encounter a striking piece of early “technology”: a mechanical horseman made entirely of brass. Those seeking the lost city are told:
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“O thou who comest up to me, if thou know not the way that leadeth to the City of Brass, rub the hand of the horseman, and he will turn, and then will stop, and in whatsoever direction he stoppeth, thither proceed…for it will lead thee to the City of Brass.”

It’s hard not to hear an echo of modern navigation systems here; GPS, routing algorithms, the calm voice telling us where to go next. One of my students paused here and said, “So…it’s like ancient Apple Mapsi?” And honestly, sort of, yes. But that comparison opens up more questions than it answers. Like our GPS, the horseman offers direction, certainty, and ease. But, do we follow without question? What happens when we rely on something we don’t fully understand to guide our decisions?  What happens when this technology sends us the wrong way?

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E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman gives us Olimpia, an automaton so lifelike she deceives those around her, prompting unsettling questions about perception, illusion, and what it means to recognize (or misrecognize) humanity. Another student put it this way: “It’s not just that she’s fake—it’s that people don’t notice. Or maybe don’t want to.” Another said, “Yeah, they don’t notice to the point that the dude falls in love with her.”  This is a story that raises questions about what makes something/someone real and human.  It was published in 1816.

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The questions deepen with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. What happens when we create life without considering responsibility? Just because science can do a thing, should it do it? Asimov gives us robots bound by rules that still manage to break them in complicated, human ways. Films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Terminator push those ideas even further, asking us to imagine what happens when the systems we build begin to think and decide for themselves.

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And then we get to YA literature, which I think does some of the most interesting work in this space. M.T. Anderson’s Feed imagines a world where technology is literally inside our heads, where our thoughts, desires, and identities are shaped by corporate algorithms. One student paused and said, “It’s like ads, but you can’t look away…because it’s in your brain.”  Neal Shusterman’s Scythe introduces a world run by an all-knowing AI that has eliminated death, except when humans are tasked with reintroducing it. A student said, “Death is fixed, but people aren’t so they do the dumbest things, and some people still have to die so Scythes have to make those choices.” Dawn Akemi Bowman’s The Infinity Courts explores what happens when even the afterlife becomes digitized and controlled.

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But what I love is how many YA novels are taking these big, abstract questions and grounding them in stories about identity, relationships, and what it means to matter.
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In Warcross and Wildcard, Marie Lu gives us immersive virtual worlds that feel thrilling and a little too familiar while quietly asking who controls the systems we rely on. One student noted, “It’s fun until you realize someone else is deciding what you see and what you win.” In The Illuminae Files, AIDAN is trying to save people and doing some truly unsettling things in the process, prompting another student to ask, “If it thinks it’s helping, does that make it less dangerous—or more?” Erin Bow’s The Scorpion Rules gives us Talis, an AI that keeps the world at peace by making impossible, calculated sacrifices. And Emily Skrutskie’s The Salvation Gambit drops us into a world where reality itself feels unstable, shaped by systems we don’t fully understand, what one reader described as “a game where you don’t even know the rules, but they still control you.” 

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And then there are these:
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• Catfishing on the CatNet  by Naomi Krittzer reminds us that even without advanced AI, digital spaces already allow for constructed identities, deception, and questions about what’s “real.”
• The Six by Mark Alpert asks: if your mind could be uploaded into a machine, would you still be you? What do we lose—and what do we keep? “So your body dies, but you’re still…you? That’s kind of creepy,” one student noted.
• The Kingdom by Jess Rothenberg imagines AI “princesses” in a theme park who begin to question the roles they’ve been programmed to play—raising questions about autonomy, storytelling, and who gets to define happily ever after.
• Defy the Stars by Claudia Gray introduces Abel, an AI who starts to feel…human, complicating the line between programming and personhood in ways that feel both hopeful and unsettling. “He acts more human than the humans,” a student pointed out, “so what does that mean?”

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What strikes me across all of these texts is how they invite readers to sit with questions rather than rush to answers:

• What do we gain and lose when we let technology make decisions for us?
• Can something be intelligent without being ethical?
• Whose ethics should be used when we are using technology?  Can we trust corporations who are making money from the technology to create ethical frameworks or do we have to use our own?
• If a machine can think, feel, or choose, what do we owe it?
• And maybe most importantly: what does it mean to be human in a world where that definition keeps shifting? 

If, as Storr suggests, our brains naturally turn the chaos of reality into story, then these texts—ancient and modern—become more than narratives. They become spaces where we rehearse the future, where we test our values, where we imagine consequences before we have to live them.

That’s the work of an ethical laboratory. These stories don’t tell us what to think, they give us space to wrestle, to imagine the possibilities, to wonder about the repercussions of our decisions and choices. As one student argued, “ These books don’t tell you what’s right. They just make it impossible not to think about it.” From Talos to Talis. From Olimpia to AIDAN. From a brass horseman pointing the way to the quiet voice of GPS telling us where to turn next, technology is integrated into our lives, our stories, and our imaginations.
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The questions haven’t really changed. But the urgency? That feels very now.