‘As My Soul Prompts It’: Agentic Prosthesis and Chat AI in The Tempest

In his service to Prospero over the course of The Tempest, the spirit Ariel performs nonhuman and wondrous feats: he can manifest in multiple places at once; conjure elaborate illusions, entertainments, and traps; and easily cross vast distances. Ariel’s capacity for transformation, surveillance, and travel defies the limits of human embodiment as well as human understanding. In this way, Prospero uses Ariel as an agentic sensory prosthesis – a kind of assistive, autonomous, and chat-based artificial intelligence (AI) – as Prospero attempts to enact revenge via disembodied control over the island upon which he is marooned. Building on scholarly frameworks that examine the ways in which prostheses and the bodies that use them become co-constitutive and mutually-affected, this article explores the extent to which Prospero and Ariel are changed by each other, as the former treats the latter as an extension of and replacement for his own powers of perception. This interplay in turn informs our modern conceptions of artificial intelligence: how we are changed and directed by interactive AI we do not fully understand, just as we change and direct AI in return.