Presenter: Nick Montfort

Summary: Text generation is not at all new, but the feverish attention it has gotten inside and outside academia, all focused on a single technology, is quite recent. Some dismiss today’s generative AI as overhyped; it's definitely underhistoricized. If researchers, artists, and even generalreaders understand more about the tremendous diversity of work done in thisarea over seven decades, we’ll be better able to realize the manypossibilities for text generation — not only those offered by large-scale,proprietary, LLM-based systems, but also what can be done with symbolic AI,scrappy approaches, pipelined generation, textualization of data, andartistic and literary interventions. Twenty-five years ago I had the the pleasure of beginning to collaborate on a project already framed by NoahWardrip-Fruin, one published in 2003 by the MIT Press (thanks to editor Doug Sery) as The New Media Reader. All indications are that our book and CD-ROM have been extremely important for a field that has burgeoned but still does not have a universally accepted name: sometimes it’s called new media, digital media, or computational media. In this talk, I’ll discuss my collaboration over the past four years with Lillian-Yvonne Bertram on Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023, co-published in November by the MIT Press and Counterpath. I’ll compare this project to The New Media Reader and describe how it may be able to inform our next few decades of innovation in computing, language, and culture.

Bio: Nick Montfort uses computation to develop literary art. His work includes ten computer-generated books (in print from seven presses), the collaboration The Deletionist and Sea and Spar Between, and Memory Slam: Batch-Era Text Generation. Among Montfort’s MIT Press books are The Future and two co-edited volumes, The New Media Reader and Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023. He’s a professor of digital media at MIT and principal investigator at the University of Bergen’s Center for Digital Narrative. He directs a lab/studio, The Trope Tank, and lives in New York City.

Hosted by: Michael Mateas
 

IMPORTANT: There will be a remote viewing room at SVC Campus, in room 3218.