Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester.

What is literature in the age of ChatGPT? How does poetry change when writing has been automated? And when any text you read could be produced by an artificial intelligence, does the difference between human and machine writing still make sense? In this course, we explore the impact of the most recent large language models on how literature is made and read today, and discover the history of computerized writing from the early experiments of the 1950s to today’s AI systems, with a detour via the Baroque. We will ask questions such as: What kind of language does a language model produce? What is meaning for a machine that cannot mean anything? Can computers be authors? And is there anything left for us to write? The course combines the close reading of computer-generated texts and learning to reflect about their theoretical background with creative computational student projects. No prior programming skills are necessary. This class will be taught in English.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills