Literary Theory for Robots

November 27, 2023
In this thought-provoking treatise, Tenen (Plain Text), a Columbia University English professor and former software engineer, examines the forebears of text-generating artificial intelligence. Highlighting how contemporary concerns about AI echo centuries-old debates, Tenen notes that 17th-century poet Quirinus Kuhlmann objected to German polymath Athanasius Kirchner’s Mathematical Organ—a box-shaped device with a complex system of wooden slates that, when properly arranged, could “compose music, write poetry... and even do advanced math”—because Kuhlmann believed it reduced users to parroting information, instead of producing genuine knowledge. Elsewhere, Tenen covers such experiments as William Cook’s 1928 Plotto manual for generating story ideas (“imagine a really complicated Choose Your Own Adventure story,” which allowed authors to chart a plot from start to finish) and linguist Noam Chomsky’s semisuccessful attempts to teach English grammar to a primitive computer in the 1960s. The history provides crucial perspective on the contemporary AI boom, and Tenen’s incisive analysis offers cautious optimism about the future, suggesting that while AI will upend the jobs of legal professionals, writers, and other “intellectual laborers,” those workers will also be “freed” from regurgitating facts and can instead “challenge themselves with more creative tasks.” Timely and original, this is an essential resource on the history of text-generating AI, and its future. Photos.