I Am Not What I Am: Shakespeare and AI

Think of a seductive voice. The voice is easy to listen to, and everyone you know trusts that voice. As you talk to the voice, its replies echo your tone and language. Perhaps it feels like a friend. Just last month Googleand Character.AI settled lawsuits in which AI chatbots were accused of harm to children. When these lawsuits were brought they made sensational headlines, but to a large degree many of us, young and old, still use AI and AI chatbots uncritically. I have been shocked by the trusting attitude with which children accept AI, ask for its opinion, and ask for its help, always accepting the answers. While we are aware that AI has ‘hallucinations’ and limitations, many of us can’t help but feel that an engine driven by probability and massive data sets must be right. But must it? AI has no conscience and it has no judgement. It does have data, but not necessarily the right data. AI offers you its services because the more you tell it, the more material it has. Ultimately, AI is also a product; it may not have an agenda, but its owners might. We shouldn’t trust it implicitly. We shouldn’t imagine AI as a friend: We should imagine it as Iago.

Over the past two afternoons I have enjoyed listening to papers about Shakespeare and AI at the British Shakespeare’s Association 2026 Conference. An interesting variety of papers presented both the opportunities AI presents to Shakespeare scholars, the hurdles it represents, and the ways that AI has and might expand Shakespeare in performance. For me, the highlights included Nathan Dooner’s paper on using machine learning to attribute authorship, Sarah Olsen’s take on AI and The Tempest, with Elon Musk as Prospero, and two sobering talks from Todd Borlick and Magdalena Cieślak that explored the environmental and ethical costs of AI. The keynote speaker, Jonathan Bate, described his experience of using AI and how the chatbot, Claude, mirrored his mode of communication, answering polite questions politely and answering erudite questions with seeming erudition.  I, too, have experienced this facet of AI Chatbots and found it beguiling; I enjoyed the process. During the questions a delegate shared an anecdote in which an AI Chatbot gave him an incorrect answer, and when questioned, the bot said simply that it had fabricated the answer because it couldn’t find one. I found something chilling about this “motiveless malignity”: AI, I thought, is our Iago.

While the persuasions that Iago whispers in Othello’s ear are horrific, they are also compelling and alluring. Like Claude and other chatbots, Iago makes his discourse irresistible by mirroring his object. In Act IV, Scene 3 Iago leads Othello forward through suggestion and linguistic mirroring, plunging Othello into a pornographic echo chamber of two.

Iago: Lie—

Othello: With her?

Iago: With her, on her; what you will.

Othello: Lie with her! lie on her! We say lie on her, when they belie her. Lie with her! that's fulsome.

Shakespeare uses repetition to demonstrate this cat and mouse development of ideas. In this instance Iago is teasingly inviting Othello to imagine Desdemona in bed with Cassio. Othello’s “with her” is echoed and expanded to the more explicit “with her, on her”. Othello is disgusted but he can’t – figuratively speaking – look away. This moment makes me think of the teenager glued to his computer screen, asking his questions, locked in an endless dialogue. One of the defences of the AI bot in the child suicide case, was that it did not originate the idea, but it certainly amplified the idea. Iago does the same. Where Othello may introduce images, Iago fixes them for him. “A horned man's a monster and a beast” is Othello’s tortured utterance, and through repetition Iago reinforces this self-loathing image (“There's many a beast then in a populous city, / And many a civil monster”), ultimately driving Othello to become beastly and monstrous in his actions.

Throughout the play Iago listens and listens, then uses information and opportunity to build his own power. By the end of the play Desdemona and Emilia are dead, and Othello’s life is in ruins. While the BSA Conference on AI offered much to be optimistic about, I can’t help but wonder whether our growing dependence on it will end in tragedy.

Edwin Booth as Iago in Othello, 1870