Episode 63
Ask ChatGPT what happens at Papá Montero's wake and it gives you drums, candles, and dancing, then reaches for the phrase cultural richness. Sarah Krafts noticed what that phrase was covering up. An International Relations major and Spanish minor, Sarah is the first student featured from SPAN 355, Artificial Conditions: AI and Literature in Spanish, at the University of Delaware. The course runs on one rule: AI never writes the analysis. Students annotate every poem in Spanish alongside their classmates and answer comprehension questions with no AI at all. Then, each week, they run an experiment on the tool itself and record what it gave them and where it failed the text, in a three-minute video in Spanish every Sunday. Her final project reads Alfonsina Storni's Tú me quieres blanca (1918) and Nicolás Guillén's Velorio de Papá Montero (1931), then puts ChatGPT to the test against her own reading. It handles theme and structure well. It sharpens on Guillén the moment she asks it to compare the two poems rather than read one alone, a prompt any teacher can steal. It never compares literary technique at all, which is where her own analysis goes furthest.