Dennis Yi Tenen | Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write

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Dennis Yi Tenen is an associate professor of English at Columbia University, where he also serves as co-director of the Center for Comparative Media. Affiliated with Columbia’s Data Science Institute, he is a former fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and worked as a Microsoft engineer in the Windows group, where he wrote code that runs on millions of personal computers around the world. His articles, which span topics ranging from literary theory to computational narratology, can be found in such journals as Amodern, New Literary History, and boundary2. In Literary Theory for Robots, Tenen takes readers on a centuries-spanning trip through automation to explore the relationship between writers and emerging technologies.
Recorded April 11, 2024
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[@jonathanedwardgibson]

In grade school I made a country-western song-plot formulator branching common tropes around liquor and trucks & sleeping w/ wife’s sister for multiple stories. Yawn. How does one verify digital data when we are punk’d by cheap deep fakes at every level of society. How does forensic ‘digital history’ work when the physics corollary of IO is OI: what can be read, can be written, and then re-written. How long until this man and trivial rear-view mirror event is replaced with updated avatar and how would we know? Welcome to Orwellville. You have nothing, but hearsay and questions, without physical cross-checks - like some form of physical minting, external systems of parallel documentation, other societies. Rewriting history is an ages old tradition designed to favor select handfuls. We cannot trust much beyond 1700’s without cross-checks.