CMPINF 1207 - WRITING MACHINES

Minimum Credits: 3
Maximum Credits: 3
Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT promise--or threaten--to upend everything we know about writing. Can machines really write? What do writing machines do to or for human writers? This class approaches the contemporary buzz about ChatGPT and Natural Language Generation (NLG) through a sociotechnical and historical lens, exploring automated writing through historical and contemporary writing machines: 18th century automatons, Ouija boards, combinatorial poetics, procedural algorithms, recurrent neural networks, and the transformer technology that drives cutting-edge LLMs like ChatGPT. The course is organized into units focusing on different methods of automating writing: mechanical; spiritual; procedural; statistical; simulative. Each unit teaches students historical and technical contexts of its associated automation through texts and hands-on projects. Students who take this class will learn to generate text using computational processes and critically examine the text they produce. In so doing, students will engage with the political and ethical implications of large-scale data usage to train machine learning algorithms, including issues of underrepresented languages, bias, hate speech, further marginalizing communities, automating labor, environmental impacts, dirty data, and privacy violations. As we trace the development and commercialization of NLG, we'll consider whose writing is being automated, and for what purposes.
Academic Career: Undergraduate
Course Component: Lecture
Grade Component: LG/SNC Elective Basis

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