“Will we have a machine capable of replacing the poet and the author?” asked Italo Calvino in 1967, hopeful that computers would write “literature.” In 1962 poet Nanni Balestrini instructed a computer to write a poem eager to hear “the voice of the machine.” Novels, non-fiction books, print media articles, screenplays, music and videos have already been composed through algorithms and a truly literary novel is expected soon. How do we instruct a computer to write a novel? Should we use algorithms or machine learning? Class will experiment with machine writing and its growing role on political disinformation and fake news.
