How Collaborating With Artificial Intelligence Could Help Writers of the Future

Art has long been claimed as a final frontier for automation--a field seen as so ineluctably human that AI may never master it. But as robots paint self-portraits, machines overtake industries, and natural language processors write New York Times columns, this long-held belief could be on the way out. Computational literature or electronic literature--that is, literature that makes integral use of or is generated by digital technology--is hardly new. Alison Knowles used the programming language FORTRAN to write poems in 1967 and a novel allegedly written by a computer was printed as early as 1983. Universities have had digital language arts departments since at least the 90s.