Just to the side of the stage, level with the musicians, sat a pair of neuroscientists, Ying Choon Wu and Alex Khalil, who had been monitoring the brain waves of two audience volunteers sitting nearby, with their heads encased in research-grade headsets from a company called Cognionics. Wu, a scientist at the University of California, San Diego, investigates the effects of works of art on the brain; in another study, she's observing the brain waves of people viewing paintings at the San Diego Museum of Art. Khalil, a former U.C. San Diego researcher who now teaches ethnomusicology at University College Cork in Ireland, focuses on how music gets people to synchronize their behavior. Both aim to integrate art and science. Which makes them a good match for Allado-McDowell, who first pitched "Song of the Ambassadors" in January 2021 as a participant in the Collider, a Lincoln Center fellowship program supported by the Mellon Foundation.

Last week, while giving a commencement speech to New York University graduates, pop star Taylor Swift offered a timely bit of advice: "No matter how hard you try to avoid being cringe, you will look back on your life and cringe retrospectively. Cringe is unavoidable over a lifetime." We live in inescapably cringe-y times. Los Angeles-based writer K. Allado-McDowell's new novel, Amor Cringe, is a love letter to cringe maximalism. Allado-McDowell set out to write the cringiest story possible and ended up creating an odd, surprisingly funny little book.

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.

How would an AI writing program start an article on the future of AI writing? Well, there's one easy way to find out: I used the best known of these tools, OpenAI's GPT-3, to do the job for me. Using GPT-3 is disarmingly simple. You have a text box to type into and a menu on the side to adjust parameters, like the "temperature" of the response (which essentially equates to randomness). You type, hit enter, and GPT-3 completes what you've written, be it poetry, fiction, or code. I tried inputting a simple headline and a few sentences about the topic, and GPT-3 began to fill in the details. It told me that AI uses "a series of autocomplete-like programs to learn language" and that these programs analyze "the statistical properties of the language" to "make educated guesses based on the words you've typed previously."

K Allado-McDowell had been working with artificial intelligence for years--they established the Artists and Machine Intelligence program at Google AI--when the pandemic prompted a new, more personal kind of engagement. During this period of isolation, they started a conversation with GPT-3, the latest iteration of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer language model released by OpenAI earlier this year. GPT-3 is, in short, a statistical language model drawing on a training corpus of 499 billion tokens (mostly Common Crawl data scraped from the internet, along with digitized books and Wikipedia) that takes a user-contributed text prompt and uses machine learning to predict what will come next. The results of Allado-McDowell's explorations--a multigenre collection of essays, poetry, memoir, and science fiction--were recently published in the U.K. as Pharmako-AI, the first book "co-authored" with GPT-3. By its very nature, the book forces us to ask who is responsible for which aspects of its authorship and to question how we imagine or conceptualize that nonhuman half.