The Shakespeare Test: Twenty-First Century Literature, Shakespeare, and AI in Machines Like Me
22.05.2026Prof. Kirsten Sandrock
In Machines Like Me: And People Like You (2019) Ian McEwan invokes the works of William Shakespeare to think about the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and literature in the twenty-first century. The novel translates key characters and themes from The Tempest into an AI context to consider what life would be like in a brave new posthumanist world. Specifically, Machines Like Me adapts parts of the drama to engage with questions of machine emotions, posthuman power relations, and AI text production, all the while asking how contemporary debates about human-nonhuman relations are connected to the early modern past. This article suggests that McEwan is not alone in resorting to Shakespeare when thinking about twenty-first-century literature and AI. As the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to produce more and more complex texts develops, Shakespeare’s name and works frequently function as reference points to assess the abilities of machines to generate texts that humans might consider creative. The Shakespeare Test, as I call the implicit or explicit comparison of nonhuman text production to Shakespeare and his works, has become a paradigm in AI studies that illustrates how large Shakespeare looms over the present. Machines Like Me goes beyond a semantic version of the Shakespeare Test by asking whether early modern paradigms of authorship can help us think about literature in the age of AI. The novel illustrates that the function of the Shakespeare Test – and comparisons with the human production of literature in general – goes beyond the production of surface language fluency. It is a test about literature’s meaningfulness in the twenty-first century and about the meaning of modernity.
