• The Great Automatic Grammatizator: writing, labour, computers

    Author(s):
    Martin Paul Eve (see profile)
    Date:
    2017
    Group(s):
    TC Digital Humanities, TC Philosophy and Literature, TM Literary and Cultural Theory
    Subject(s):
    Digital humanities
    Item Type:
    Article
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M61Z37
    Abstract:
    What does it mean when we say that computers can ‘write’ and how are recent developments in neural networks and machine learning changing this capacity? This article examines the long-standing literary fear of authorship being replaced by machines while also interrogating the labour and credit implications that sit behind widely used structures of authorship in a technological age. The argument makes reference to one work of computer-generated writing – Johannes Heldén & Håkan Jonson’s Evolution [2014] – and to one software paradigm (a character-based recurrent neural networks for language acquisition trained on the corpus of the journal Textual Practice). I here argue that unless we conceive more broadly of the criteria for ‘authorship’ as a labour function, and unless we take seriously the need to see textual production as social production, hybridized (but predominantly) machine identities will come to dominate a literary landscape.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.1111/criq.12359
    Publisher:
    Wiley-Blackwell
    Pub. Date:
    2017-10-27
    Journal:
    Critical Quarterly
    Volume:
    59
    Issue:
    3
    Page Range:
    39 - 54
    ISSN:
    0011-1562
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    6 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved

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