AI and Dante: Circling hell anew
By Mary Ann McDonald Carolan
Can artificial intelligence, which seemingly explains everything, help us understand Dante?
Fernando Avilés-García, a 2024 graduate of Princeton who studied computer science and Italian, certainly thought so. That’s why he built a tool to analyze the language in the Comedy which revealed some important linguistic connections within the poem.
But how much can a large language model help us read and analyze a text as complex and personal as this epic poem?
Reading the Comedy demands our active participation; a machine-generated summary will not suffice. Dante’s poem signals this from the very first line as the pilgrim awakens in Hell: “Midway on our (emphasis mine) life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood, the right road lost.” He includes us on this journey through the three canticles of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. The poet insists that we are not only readers but also companions on his pilgrimage from Hell’s utter darkness of sinfulness to Paradiso’s blinding light of God’s love. His quest is our quest. As we accompany Dante down through the circles of Hell, up the terraced mount of Purgatory, and finally into the spheres of Heaven, we come to understand that we are on a pilgrimage as well.
We follow the pilgrim physically and emotionally as he expresses fear, doubt, confusion, shame, and ultimately unspeakable joy. Yet, as we are lulled into narrative complacency, Dante the poet interjects a remembrance or exhortation which reminds us that he is writing the pilgrim’s tale. The tension between the two Dantes, poet and pilgrim, like the poem’s dynamic terza rima, keeps us engaged.
Our reading is an experience and not a collection of information. Whereas large language models provide a passive and neat repository of answers, Dante’s poem is an intellectual rollercoaster that continually questions us.
Dante’s journey to salvation is a potent display of the power of the imagination, of the poet’s ability to use his creative genius to conjure a place that seems so real while being patently unreal.
This dramatic and emotional afterworld has inspired artists from the Renaissance painter Botticelli to the surrealist Salvador Dalí to illustrate his manuscript. The Comedy resonated with filmmakers Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe De Liguoro who directed L’Inferno (1911), the first feature length Italian film which was based on the Comedy’s first canticle.
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But it also spoke to contemporary gamers who took enormous artistic license with Dante’s poem in the 2010 action-adventure videogame “Dante’s Inferno.” The first canticle of Inferno inspired Rodin to sculpt the gates of Hell (1880–1917), Sean Meredith to film a puppet show (Dante’s Inferno, 2007), and professors to teach and dramatize the poem in prison projects. The Comedy’s ubiquity in popular culture has led me to ask students to develop a creative project that demonstrates the poet’s continuing relevance in our society.
Teaching Dante is intimidating. But it is also gratifying when students grapple with the complexities of the poem, and with issues such as eternal damnation which challenge what they may have been taught about Christianity before coming to college. The final project allows them to apply the epic poem to their own lives in order to demonstrate their understanding of its central ideas. In the past, my students have filmed short videos, choreographed dances, invented board games, and drawn comic strips.
Yet this past spring, the majority of Dante seminar students chose to describe the Inferno in the digital realm, a shocking revelation of the evils in the ether.
My students saw in cyberspace many instances of sinfulness, whether it be online bullying (wrath), rabid overconsumption of social media (gluttony), or indiscriminate and irresponsible use of dating apps to cheat on partners (lust).
Since most had selected this space to illustrate Dante’s importance today, I wondered whether AI may have prompted this statistically impossible result. I asked my students how AI might fit into Dante’s notion of contrapasso in which the punishment fits the crime. Where would Dante have placed AI? Would artificial intelligence be a form of false counseling (Inferno XXVI and XXVII) since it so often, at least for now, hallucinates? Would end users be considered counterfeiters or falsifiers (Inferno XXX) since their work is not authentic? Like Dante’s sinners, none of my students admitted to this potentially sinful use of technology.
Along with their creative project, students submit a written explanation of the rationale for their choice of contemporary representation. I ask them to address the major themes from our seminar. For me, writing is a form of thinking. And it is, in fact, Dante’s writing that remains with us today. But what happens now that that aspect of learning can be — and will be — outsourced to AI?
The Comedy remains relevant 700 years after its creation precisely because it does not offer answers but rather poses questions. This spiritual exploration — which is also poetic, political, and theological in nature — remains important because of the questions Dante the pilgrim asks of his guide Virgil in Hell regarding the rationale for various punishments, of the penitents in Purgatory regarding their path to salvation, and of the saints in Paradise regarding their placement in the Empyrean.
These questions are our questions about the ineffable. They are at the heart of the profound and complex nature of belief. And AI cannot, as of yet, supplant the deep self-examination which motivates Dante’s, and his readers’, quest.
Mary Ann McDonald Carolan is a professor of Modern Languages and Literature and director of Italian Studies at Fairfield University, writing this essay as a member of the Meditz College Canisius Faculty Fellows program.
