THE LLM LAB is an ongoing research project led by Dr. Ainehi Edoro and her students exploring artificial intelligence through humanistic approaches, with a focus on literary and media studies.

The project began with a course on AI and writing in Spring 2026 and has since been reimagined as a lab project titled Writing Machines, offered as a Fall 2026 literature course. The lab is part of Dr. Edoro’s appointment as a faculty fellow at the newly established Center for Humanistic Inquiry into AI and Uncertainty. For 15 weeks, Dr. Edoro and 20 students from majors across the university will consider everything from literature and philosophy to engineering papers and divination archives. They want to think about how AI might be studied in conjunction with histories of writing and the literary imagination.

The lab approaches AI as an open research problem. Its primary project is to collectively build an archive in the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, a kind of “magic encyclopedia” that holds the charges and tensions produced when different perspectives, disciplines, and knowledge systems are placed alongside one another in an effort to understand something as old, large, and diffuse as AI. The aim is to develop humanistic ways of investigating AI while listening for what AI, in turn, might uncover about language and media.

This website is the public side of that project. It features commentary on AI in the news, books, conversations with researchers, events and announcements, and stories about AI research and culture in Wisconsin.

Go here for the course schedule and readings.

Find Dr. Edoro on Instagram @ainehiedoro