Dear colleagues, We invite submissions for "Intelligence and Imitation: Mind, Mechanism, Mimesis," the Humanities of AI Workshop, to be held at Johns Hopkins University, April 24–26, 2026. Please feel free to circulate this announcement. With best regards, Ksenia Tatarchenko INTELLIGENCE AND IMITATION: MIND, MECHANISM, MIMESIS Humanities of AI Workshop Johns Hopkins University April 24–26, 2026 As a creative aspiration, the Greek notion of mimesis (“imitation”) manifested not only in artistic works imitating reality and philosophical speculation but also in scientific theories and mechanical artifacts. Plato and Aristotle’s nous; Hobbes’s and La Mettrie’s machine-like mind and world; the Jaquet-Droz automata; Kempelen’s chess-playing Turk; Wiener’s cybernetic analogies; Mori’s “uncanny valley”; and Yuri Lotman’s conception of culture as a collective mind exemplify the broad relevance of imitation to science, literature, and culture. Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) participate in this legacy but also complicate it. Across AI’s research history, systems have been claimed to represent, simulate, assist, improve upon, substitute for, or replace human cognition. Concepts such as optimization, satisficing, and superintelligence run orthogonal to classical notions of mimesis. At the same time, developments in science and society have challenged both mimesis and mindedness as ideals. Embodied and Darwinian cognition, as well as analyses of labor, material reproduction, and social stratification (Marx, Wallerstein, Pasquinelli, among others), call into question the value and veracity of material imitations and accounts of “intelligent” labor. Contemporary divisions in AI uptake—anti-AI activism, competing governance regimes, and popular terms such as “AI slop”—underscore these challenges. We announce a three-day workshop for the presentation and discussion of new humanities research engaging these themes. Our aim is to foster critical engagement with AI in its history, socioeconomic context, architecture, and cultural significance. We invite submissions from early-career (including graduate students) and established scholars. POSSIBLE TOPICS (non-exhaustive) - Mimesis and mechanical imitation from antiquity to the transformer - Transformer architectures and the hermeneutic circle - Political economy of digital infrastructures sustaining LLMs - New histories of literary cybernetics and NLP - Human–LLM hybridity and joint agency - Anthropomorphism and relations with the (in)animate - Emotional AI as mimesis or optimization The workshop will also include collective reflection on the humanities of AI as a research domain: its present state, future directions, relations to the sciences, and sociotechnical impact. FEATURED SPEAKERS Yulia Frumer (Johns Hopkins University) Steven Gross (Johns Hopkins University) N. Katherine Hayles (UCLA / Duke University, Emerita) Matthew L. Jones (Princeton University) Matthew Kirschenbaum (University of Virginia) Patrick McCray (UC Santa Barbara / Library of Congress) Alexander Williams Tolbert (Emory University) SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS Submit a single Word or PDF file by January 31 to: Jiantong Liao (jliao20@jh.edu) Please include: - Abstract (~300 words) - Short bio (name, affiliation, contact email) - Up to five keywords Decisions will be communicated within one month. Accepted participants will be asked to submit up to 3,000 words for pre-circulation. SUPPORTING INSTITUTIONS Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, Johns Hopkins University https://krieger.jhu.edu/humanities-institute/ Center for Equitable AI & Machine Learning Systems (CEAMLS), Morgan State University https://www.morgan.edu/ceamls ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Jiantong Liao, Johns Hopkins University Ksenia Tatarchenko, Johns Hopkins University Phillip Honenberger, Morgan State University