Literary Theory for Robots

"Timely and original, this is an essential resource on the history of text generating AI, and its future.-- ""Publishers Weekly"" Intriguing. . .Yi Tenen, stirring some wit and anecdotes into the story, sets out the material in non-technical terms, making for an entertaining, informative read. An eclectic and erudite tale of how wide-eyed visions become smart, interactive tools.-- ""Kirkus"" Reading this book is like taking a walk in a literary forest. You will see up close trees whose names you never knew and discover paths that lead your mind in new directions. Tenen guides us along the way, by putting in historical context how machines started out as voracious readers and emerged as creative writers.--Jeannette M. Wing, Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University Literary Theory for Robots is many things--brainy, chatty, charming, disarming--but, above all, it is great fun to read. Dennis Yi Tenen's cast of 'lovely weirdos' and their wheels, charts, templates, schemas, and links will stay with me for a long time. So will his insistence that intelligence is a social and collective phenomenon, one whose history reveals the human presence behind every machine.--Merve Emre, author of The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing Literary Theory for Robots serves as an alternative to the breathless utopian or apocalyptic hallucinations of the tech bros funding the AI revolution, instead offering a highly relatable perspective on thinking machines grounded in history, literature, and lived human experience. Tenen shows that truly understanding the future of our digital augmentation depends not on more STEM but on more liberal arts. This book will be remembered as the moment thinking people realized how to raise better robots: read them good stories.--Douglas Rushkoff, author of Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires"