Aarhus University Seal

Dennis Yi Tenen visited Human Futures

Associate professor of literature and former software engineer at Microsoft, Dennis Yi Tenen, gave a lecture discussing story generators from the 1960s and 70s.

Dennis Yi Tenen
Dennis Yi Tenen
Picture of the book "The Plot-Genie"

It was with an interdisciplinary audience from fields such as media studies, comparative literature, and anthropology, that Dennis Yi Tenen held his lecture on story generators and artificial intelligence on January 17. Especially the discussions were lively and produced many perspectives on how and when such – seemingly – different fields as computational narratology and literary history overlap.

 

Computational linguistics and literary history

Dennis Yi Tenen is an Associate professor at Columbia University and author of the book Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation. His work is within topics that include literary history, the sociology of literature, media history, and computational narratology. His lecture at Aarhus University was entitled “Authoring Artificial Intelligence: Chatbots and Story Generators of the 1960s-70s” and drew on his most recent work on the book Author Function: An Inquiry Concerning the Creative Limits of Artificial Intelligence, which has not even been published yet.

The starting point of the lecture was Tenens work with deciphering the codes from a 1959 story generator. Interestingly, the point was here that the schema structuring the computer was similar to the schemas characterizing the history of formalism. This, of course, stirred discussions of the role of aesthetics, and whether mass-produced narratives are part of the creative process – or only belong to contexts outside aesthetic history.    


 

Oops, an error occurred! Code: 202403290750159a5e0383