Isabelle Levent

The “story seeds” control allowed writers to experiment with using Wordcraft to generate ideas at the very beginning of the writing process. MT described the “story seeds” control as giving her “a place on my computer to go that looked like a blank page but did not behave as such.” E

Even when these paragraphs fail, they make her interested in the story again. She’s curious about this computer-generated text, and it reignites her interest in her own writing.

For a computer to make a subtle combinational joke, never mind to assess its tastefulness, would require, first, a data-base with a richness comparable to ours, and, second, methods of link-making (and link-evaluating) comparable in subtlety with ours. 

Academically, this is a collision of everything from computer science and art history to media studies to disruptive innovation to labor economics, and no one of these disciplines seems sufficient to cover the topic. 

If I have an idea for a novel, but the computer writes most of it, is it still my story? This question will not be answered with numbers about how many words I or the computer wrote. It’s going to be answered culturally; it’s going to be a feeling we have about where authenticity or truth really lies.

the reconfiguration of culture as a domain of not just human-made meanings but also machinic calculation