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Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write (A Norton Short)
Bottom of the pile
11
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
12/100Critics
10/100Scholars
Author:
Dennis Yi Tenen
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
Date:
February 6, 2024
Literary Theory for Robots reveals the hidden history of modern machine intelligence, taking readers on a spellbinding journey from medieval Arabic philosophy to visions of a universal language, past Hollywood fiction factories and missile defense systems trained on Russian folktales. In this reflection on the shared pasts of literature and computer science, former Microsoft engineer and professor of comparative literature Dennis Yi Tenen provides crucial context for recent developments in AI, which holds important lessons for the future of humans living with smart technology.
What The Reviewers Say
Peculiar.
Playful.
The underlying problem at the heart of Literary Theory for Robots is the irreconcilable conflict between the goal of the book and the goal of its author. The goal of a book like this is to educate the non-specialist reader about the nuances of AI’s interaction with the literary and artistic worlds of human creativity. But the goal of its author is pretty clearly to thrill-frighten a TED talk audience already tipsy on afternoon white wine..
Intriguing.
