
Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write

The work of encoding values into software systems can now be more trivially automated.
Dennis Yi Tenen • Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write
The disassembly of a chatbot, a smart mobile phone assistant for instance, reveals multiple, diffuse locations where thought happens. Some “smarts” are baked into the circuit. Some happen in the cloud. Some lead to large-scale feats of electrical engineering, software development, and project management. More threads connect to institutional decisi
... See moreDennis Yi Tenen • Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write
The world itself attains universality only from a great distance, described in broad strokes by physics or theology. Its particulars often differ depending on the local context.
Dennis Yi Tenen • Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write
Thinking happens in the mind, by the hand, with a tool—and, by extension, with the help of others.
Dennis Yi Tenen • Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write
In putting the algorithm in charge gramatically, researchers abnegate their own complicity—and by extension, our agency in the matter.
Dennis Yi Tenen • Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write
Visiting an imaginary botanical garden of the world, we find a multitude of conflicting labels, some torn, others written over or illegible.
Dennis Yi Tenen • Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write
That’s not to believe that everything becomes relative there, nor that anything goes.
Dennis Yi Tenen • Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write
The best of us occurs more rarely in comparison to our base impulses. Frequency alone therefore does not suffice for intelligence, in a basic pedagogical sense.
Dennis Yi Tenen • Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write
Platonic universal rationalism tolerates contingent, nonrational paths to enlightenment.