Co-presented by Litquake, City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, The Grid, Goethe-Institut San Francisco
When GPT-3, OpenAI’s language generator, launched last year, people across the Internet fed it reams of literary data to create poems, plays, scripts and stories. Computational tools allow distant reading at a scale far beyond the scope of human comprehension. As texts become data and algorithms become co-authors, some futurists speculate that humans will relinquish creative fields to machines. In the work of authorship and analysis, artificial intelligence promises to remake the landscape of literature as we have long known it. Yet, literary history is replete with work composed by, with and for machines, from Pāṇini’s pioneering work in generative grammar to the avant-garde poetry of Dada and OuLiPo. Join Catherine Flynn, Chen Quifan, and Robin Sloan for a spirited discussion of AI’s influence on how we read and how we write. Moderated by Vanessa Chang and Bettina Wodianka.
FREE, $5-10 suggested donation (pre-registration required)
Litquake's 2021 Festival runs from 10/7-10/23. Full schedule at litquake.org!
