Schedule
(1182 Words, 7 Minutes)
Introduction
Tuesday, January 16
Introduction to the Course & Each Other
Thursday, January 18: How Do We Think of AI?
Required Media:
- Naomi Kritzer, “Cat Pictures Please” (2015), external link
- selections from Janelle Shane, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You (2021), Canvas link
Tuesday, January 23: How (In General) Does AI Writing Work?
- Ted Underwood, “Mapping the Latent Spaces of Culture” (2021), external link
- Stephen Wolfram, “What is ChatGPT Doing…and Why Does It Work?” (2023), external link
- Emily M. Bender, “Thought experiment in the National Library of Thailand” (2023), external link
In-class work: A GPT-4 Capability Forecasting Challenge
Unit 1: Automata
Thursday, January 25: Simulating Nature
Required Media:
- Jessica Riskin, “Frolicsome Engines: The Long Prehistory of Artificial Intelligence” (2016), external link
- Edgar Allan Poe, “Maelzel’s Chess-Player” (1836), external link
Tuesday, January 30: Mechanization
Required Media:
- First, read Abby Mullen’s advice about “How to Listen to a Podcast for Class” (2020), external link
- Then, listen to The Last Archive, “Player Piano” (2023), Note: ~1 hour listening time, external link
Bonus historical context for the ambitious:
- John Phillip Sousa, “The Menace of Mechanical Music” (1906), external link
Thursday, February 1: Workshop
In-class work: AI Paper audit project workshop
Tuesday, February 6: Capital
Required Media:
- Fredric Brown, “Etaoin Shrdlu” (1942), external link
- Ted Chiang, “Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?” (2023), external link
Thursday, February 8: Field Trip!
Class visit to the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library
Unit 2: Automatic Writing
Tuesday, February 13: Pun Intended
- Alex Gil, “On the Uses of Text beyond Intention” (2023), external link
- Sarah Bull, “Content Generation in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (2023), Canvas link
Thursday, February 15: Cut & Paste
Required Media:
- Everest Pipkin, “A Long History of Generated Poetics” (2016), external link
In-class work: Cut-up poetry
Tuesday, February 20: Computational Poetry
Required Media:
- Dan Rockmore and Kyle Booten, “The Anxiety of Imitation: On the ‘Boringness’ of Creative Turing Tests” (2020), external link
Then browse these works of computational poetry and choose at least 2 poems from 2 different poets to discuss in class:
- Allison Parrish, Decontextualize (not all these are poetry, but you can search for the word “poem” on the page to find relevant pieces)
- Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, from Travesty Generator
- Douglas Kearney, from The Black Automaton
- Nick Montfort, from https://nickm.com/poems/
- Milton Laufer, from https://miltonlaufer.com.ar/
- poems from the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 4 (Go to the volume index, click on “genre” and then scroll down to “poetry”)
Small Group Activity: Markov chain poetry
Thursday, February 22: Workshop
In-class workshop: Tracery
Tuesday, February 27: Robotic Prose
Required media:
- Mark Riedl, “An Introduction to AI Story Generation” (2021), external link
- Ken Liu, “The Magic in the Machine” (2023), external link
Thursday, February 29 (Leap Day!): Oh the Humanity!
Required Media:
- Nina Beguš, “Experimental Narratives: A Comparison of Human Crowdsourced Storytelling and AI Storytelling” (2023), external link
Then choose 1 of the following to read closely and discuss in class:
- Vauhini Vara, “Ghosts” (2021), external link
- Michelle Huang, “Training an AI Chatbot on my Childhood Journal Entries” (2022), external link
- Chiara Coetzee, “Generating a full-length work of fiction with GPT-4” (2023), external link
- Mark Marino, “Can ChatGPT Copy Your Writing Style?” (2023), external link
Tuesday, March 5: Comparing Models
While ChatGPT (a.k.a. GPT-4) has been the primary newsmaker over the past year or so, many other models—including some interesting domain-specific ones—have been developed. Today we’ll explore how distinct models represent language differently, and how that changes what we can learn with and from those models. We will look at (at least) these:
- MonadGPT, a model trained on 17th-century texts
- Epstein & Brahe, trained on English Literature
- AI Dungeon, a model trained on RPG & related text
- NovelAI, a model trained on fiction, with “modules” that emulate particular genres/authors/etc.
- Grok, a model by X (formerly Twitter) trained on social media data and emulating the tone of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
In-class workshop: Comparing Language Models
Thursday, March 7: Flex Day
Spring Break: March 9-17
Unit 3: Intelligence
Tuesday, March 19: Understanding Understanding
Required Media:
- selections from Janelle Shane, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You (2021), Canvas link
- Blaise Agüera Y Arcas, “Do Large Language Models Understand Us?” (2022): 183–97, external link
Thursday, March 21
TBD
Tuesday, March 26: Heartless Killing Machine, part 1
Required Media:
- Martha Wells, All Systems Red (2017), chapters 1-3
Thursday, March 28: Heartless Killing Machine, part 2
Required Media:
- Martha Wells, All Systems Red (2017), chapters 4-5
Unit 4: Resistance
Tuesday, April 2: (Just a Few of) The Problems with AI
Required Media:
There has been a raft of media over the past few years discussing the ethical, legal, and other problems with generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT. By this point in the semester we’ll have talked about many of these threads, but this week we’ll dig in as best as we can. To prepare, choose 2 of the following (in alphabetical order by author, not order of priority) to read closely and be ready to discuss in class:
- Ted Chiang, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web” (2023), external link
- Kate Knibbs, “The Battle Over Books3 Could Change AI Forever” (2023), external link
- Cade Metz, “Lawsuit Takes Aim at the Way A.I. Is Built,” The New York Times, (2022), external link
- Caroline Mimbs Nyce, “AI Has a Hotness Problem” (2023), external link
- Lorena O’Neil, “These Women Tried to Warn Us About AI” (2023), external link
- Alex Reisner, “Revealed: The Authors Whose Pirated Books Are Powering Generative AI” (2023), external link
- Zachary Small, “An Art Professor Says A.I. Is the Future. It’s the Students Who Need Convincing” (2023), external link
- Nitasha Tiku, Kevin Schaul, and Szu Yu Chen, “These Fake Images Reveal How AI Amplifies Our Worst Stereotypes” (2023), external link.
Thursday, April 4: Digital Materialism
Required Media:
- Crawford, Kate, and Vladan Joler. “Anatomy of an AI System: The Amazon Echo as an Anatomical Map of Human Labor, Data and Planetary Resources” (2018), external link
Tuesday, April 9: Analog AI
Note: we will divide the class into two groups this week through a sign-up form. Each day, one group will meet at Skeuomorph Press for the “Analog AI” workshop, while the other group will complete a remote activity via Canvas that will help you workshop your Unessay projects.
In class workshop: Analog AI/Unessay
Thursday, April 11: Analog AI
Note: we will divide the class into two groups this week through a sign-up form. Each day, one group will meet at Skeuomorph Press for the “Analog AI” workshop, while the other group will complete a remote activity via Canvas that will help you workshop your Unessay projects.
In class workshop: Analog AI/Unessay
Tuesday, April 16: Luddism
Required Media:
- Cory Doctorow, “Science Fiction Is a Luddite Literature”(2021), external link
- Miriam A. Cherry, “The Future Encyclopedia of Luddism” (2021), external link.
Optional (but highly recommended) podcast episode:
- Sophie Bushwick Feder Elah, “What the Luddites Can Teach Us about AI” (2023), external link
Thursday, April 18: Where Does This Leave Us?
Required Media:
- Dan McQuillan, “We Come to Bury ChatGPT, Not to Praise It.” (2023), external link
- Dave Karpf, “On Technological Optimism and Technological Pragmatism” (2023), external link
Conclusions
Tuesday, April 23: Work Day
In-class work: Unessays
Thursday, April 25: Presentations
Final Unessay Presentations (Group 1)
Tuesday, April 30: Presentations
Final Unessay Presentations (Group 2)