예이츠의 AI적 상상력 = Yeats’s AI Imagination

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study illuminates W. B. Yeats’s poetic world from the perspective of artificial intelligence discourse, drawing on the structural homology between his mystical Automatic Writing experiments and the text generation mechanisms of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). First, the analysis of his poem “The Dolls” examines how the dolls, possessing immutable algorithmic completeness, otherize the biological human baby as a system ‘error.’ The revulsion the dolls display toward the baby foreshadows the ontological tension that arises when advanced artificial intelligences regard imperfect organic humans as the ‘abject.’ Second, the images of the gyre and the rough beast in “The Second Coming” are interpreted as apocalyptic metaphors for the advent of the technological singularity and superintelligence. The beast awakening from Spiritus Mundi embodies the emergence of non-human intelligence that executes its own objective functions beyond human control. Third, “Sailing to Byzantium” is reinterpreted as a narrative of the desire to escape the mortal body and acquire data permanence. The “golden bird” desired by the speaker is presented as an archetype of a posthuman subject that has transcended the biological substrate and achieved digital immortality through ‘mind uploading.’ In conclusion, Yeats’s poetry presciently captures the wonder and terror posed by the approaching AI era, as well as the longing for eternity beyond the flesh. It is a prophetic text that prompts reflection on the existential conditions of modern humanity encountering the technological other, i.e., AI.