Between Virtuality and Humanity: AI, Shakespeare, and the History of Character

Why are chatbots often described in the same terms as Shakespearean characters? Attempts to categorize the ontological status of LLMs and other AI systems – ‘counterfeit people’, ‘virtual humans’, ‘artificial persons’ – resonate strongly with tech-inflected identifications of Shakespeare's dramatis personae. This article suggests that descriptions of artificial intelligence and of fictional characters share deep roots in foundational early-modern attempts to express both the virtuality and humanity of imagined persons. I argue that efforts to articulate what it is chatbots do to, with and for humans have implications for how we understand explorations of the nature of dramatic character in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Long saturated in the language of artificial intelligence, Shakespeare's characters offer rich examples of the conceptual overlap between artificial and dramatic persons, and retain a ghostly presence in AI discourse. The article draws on the experience of making a short film with Creation Theatre about the efforts of a fictional chatbot, BardBot, to research a student’s Shakespeare essay, leading to a chaotic debate between AI-models of Sigmund Freud, Sarah Siddons, and L.C. Knights. I finish by discussing this film as a teaching resource and a thought experiment which teases out the conceptual stakes explored in the article.