Americanist Lunch Forum - AI Literacy from Prompt Engineering to Electronic Literature with Dr. Elizabeth Losh

In an April 2025 executive order the Trump administration championed "AI literacy" as a goal for education. However, the literacy imagined in this document appears to be functional in nature rather than critical or creative, intended to approach new technologies instrumentally rather than question their premises or design. 

This talk looks at AI literacy initiatives in higher education and the work of task forces of the Modern Language Association to argue for more capacious approaches to curricular reform. It examines a growing literature about “prompt engineering" that promises to impart neoliberal career skills. With acronyms like CO-STAR, CREATE, RISEN, PREP, and FACTS, prompt writers are encouraged to adopt systematic approaches to a presumably stagnant rhetorical situation, accepting the technocultural status quo without critique. In the alternative culture of the hacker tradition, there are also “jailbreak” techniques that imagine aggressive encounters or “prompt injection” using stealth and coordinated attacks. This talk argues that the rich history of electronic literature can provide a meaningful alternative to the current hype and hubris about prompt engineering, particularly the composing practices of feminist, queer, and Black contemporary digital writers. In imagining a greater role for humanities scholarship in AI literacy, it discusses how electronic literature and digital art use the dynamic tension of prompting to simultaneously reveal and conceal the discursive structures of power relations.

Elizabeth Losh is the Duane A. and Virginia S. Dittman Professor of American Studies and English at William & Mary and Co-Chair MLA Task Force on AI In Research and Teaching.