By: Assistant Lecturer Duaa Razzaq Abbas Artificial intelligence is no longer merely a modern technology whose applications are confined to scientific, medical, and economic fields. It has become a powerful and prominent presence in the humanities, including literature and literary criticism. With the expanding use of artificial intelligence tools in reading, analysing, and generating texts, Arabic literary criticism today finds itself at the threshold of a new phase that calls for a reconsideration of the conventional concept of reading and the dialectical relationship between the critic, the text, and the emerging technological tool. Throughout its history, Arabic literary criticism has undergone numerous methodological transformations, moving from simple aesthetic and impressionistic judgments to contextual approaches, including historical, social, and psychological methodologies, and eventually to text-oriented revolutions such as structuralism, stylistics, semiotics, and deconstruction. Criticism has remained engaged in a continuous search for tools that bring it closer to the intricacies of the text and reveal its various aesthetic layers. Today, artificial intelligence enters this field as an entirely different kind of tool—one that does not merely offer a theoretical concept, but is capable of digitally processing the text itself and extracting vast amounts of data, lexical fields, and stylistic relationships within a remarkably short period of time. However, the fundamental challenge does not lie in the machine’s ability to deconstruct a text or count its words, but rather in its capacity for understanding and interpretation. A literary text is not merely a quantitative accumulation of words; it is a world charged with implications, symbols, metaphors, cultural memory, and profound human experience. Here, the problem of context becomes particularly significant. A human critic does not read a word in isolation but receives it in light of its intellectual context and the writer’s experience, whereas a machine relies on data models that may lack the cultural depth that gives a literary text its distinctiveness and aesthetic weight. The issue becomes even more complex when approaching the Arabic language, which is distinguished by the density of its morphological, syntactic, and rhetorical structures, as well as the multifaceted presence of metaphor and intertextuality. Therefore, artificial intelligence should not be viewed as a threat to or competitor of the critic, but rather as a tool that expands the horizons of critical inquiry. The machine can identify quantitative phenomena such as repetition and semantic fields, while the human critic remains uniquely capable of engaging in the act of interpretation and answering the question: Why was this particular word repeated, and what is its relationship to the writer’s consciousness? The future of Arabic literary criticism in the digital age does not lie in replacing humans with machines, but in establishing a complementary relationship that enables critics to use technology to collect data and explore patterns, allowing them to devote themselves to those areas that remain exclusive to human consciousness: constructing meaning and bringing aesthetic dimensions to light. The power of literature remains, at its core, a deeply emotional experience that affects the reader and opens up limitless possibilities of meaning. The future, therefore, will belong not to the machine alone, but to the contemporary digital critic who possesses a grounding in literary theory and knows how to harness technology in the service of reading and analysis without losing their critical perspective and human sensibility.
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