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An anthology of seven decades of English-language outputs from computer generation systems, chronicling the vast history of machine-written texts created long before ChatGPT.

Learning Objectives:

1. “Generative AI” is only one element of a long history of text generation
2. Many different sorts of people contributed to computer text generation
3. Text generation has been done across numerous genres
4. Text generation can still be done in many ways, including by individual programmers not using corporate systems

Bios:

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is an African American writer, poet, artist, and educator who works at the intersection of computation, AI, race, and gender. They are the author of Travesty Generator (Noemi Press), a book of computational poetry longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. They are the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Their other poetry books include How Narrow My Escapes (DIAGRAM/New Michigan), Personal Science (Tupelo Press), a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press). Their most recent full length poetry book, Negative Money, was published in 2023. Their chapbook, written with AI, is called A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content and won the 2023 Diagram/New Michigan chapbook contest. They direct the MFA in creative writing program at the University of Maryland and are a 2024 Foundation for Contemporary Arts poetry grant recipient and 2024 Deutsch Foundation Ruby’s Grant recipient. They are co-editor with Nick Montfort of the recently released anthology Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953-2023.

Nick Montfort uses computation to develop literary art. His work includes ten computer-generated books (in print from seven presses), the collaborations The Deletionist and Sea and Spar Between, and Memory Slam: Batch-Era Text Generation. Among Montfort’s MIT Press books are The Future and two co-edited volumes, The New Media Reader and Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023. He’s professor of digital media at MIT and principal investigator in the University of Bergen’s Center for Digital Narrative. He directs a lab/studio, The Trope Tank, and lives in New York City.