Generative Text

In Digital Humanities, we have been looking at works of generative text and bots. The pieces bring up many controversial questions that humans as a whole have difficulty answering. Before we look into these questions, here are some examples of text generators that we have looked at in class.

Sea and Spar Between by Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland is a poetry generator that includes digitized words and phrases from poetic works of Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville's Moby Dick. To explore the piece, you may type in two numbers, representing nautical coordinates, or move your mouse to explore the vast collection of generated poetry. This work brings up many questions about authorship and meaning.

Another piece of generative text is Evolution by Håkan Jonson which takes the artwork of Johannes Heldén and mimics his music and literature. The algorithm uses similar words, spacing, and dreary music as the musician/writer had created. The ultimate goal of Evolution is to pass the Turing Test, a test that looks for artificial intelligence.

In my personal opinion, Sea and Spar Between’s code has very specific phrases that are to be ran in the work. These phrases are directly taken from Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville so their credit should not be taken away. Though the programmers created the visuals and decided where to put the phrasing, Dickinson and Melville are still the authors. Evolution, on the other hand, is a little more complicated. The algorithm requires more knowledge of coding to understand. Instead of simply randomizing phrases by Johannes Heldén, it is mimicking his work to create something very different and even unique! The algorithm is essentially creating it’s own work! Does this mean the coder is the author? It is very hard to come to a conclusion and everyone has their own thoughts on this question.