Authoring Artificial Intelligence: Chatbots and Story Generators of the 1960s-70s

Abstract

The accepted historiography views early computational experiments with generative text as part of a radical avant-garde, related to contemporary developments in counter-cultural movements such as Dada, OULIPO, and Concrete Poetry. This genealogy is well documented, but incomplete. Automation in every field of human activity was related also to the market-driven, commercial enterprise with a mandate to improve efficiency. In this way, Joseph Weizenbaum’s iconic ELIZA—a computer program developed in the 1960s to mimic conversations with a Rogerian psychotherapist—was paralleled at the University of Wisconsin hospital system in the implementation of LINC—Laboratory Instrument Computer, a Skinnerian terminal designed to interview gynecologists.¹ If early experiments with computer-generated art were subversive they were also an integral part of a research program to integrate artificially-intelligent conversants into the workplace. In this talk, I would like to assemble a morphology of story and discourse generators from the 1960-1970s to arrive at the near-present moment, when such machines enter our lives through chatty “smart” home-assistants, machine-trained sentence completion algorithms, automatic story generators, and other commercial applications of the author function.

About the lecturer

Dennis Tenen is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University. His teaching and research happen at the intersection of people, texts, and technologies. A former software engineer at Microsoft and currently faculty associate at the center for Data, Media, and Society, he is the author of Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (Stanford University Press, 2017) and co-founder of Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities. His forthcoming book Author Function: Artificial Intelligence in the Automation of Creative Labor explores the history of story and discourse generators in the twentieth century.

Practical information:

The lecture will take place at Aarhus University

January 17, 3pm-5pm

Building 1580, room 249

Registration is not required