Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T17:12:45.009Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Reading Computer-Generated Texts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2021

Leah Henrickson
Affiliation:
University of Leeds

Summary

Natural language generation (NLG) is the process wherein computers produce output in readable human languages. Such output takes many forms, including news articles, sports reports, prose fiction, and poetry. These computer-generated texts are often indistinguishable from human-written texts, and they are increasingly prevalent. NLG is here, and it is everywhere. However, readers are often unaware that what they are reading has been computer-generated. This Element considers how NLG conforms to and confronts traditional understandings of authorship and what it means to be a reader. It argues that conventional conceptions of authorship, as well as of reader responsibility, change in instances of NLG. What is the social value of a computer-generated text? What does NLG mean for modern writing, publishing, and reading practices? Can an NLG system be considered an author? This Element explores such question, while presenting a theoretical basis for future studies.
Get access
Type
Element
Information
Online ISBN: 9781108906463
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication: 11 February 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abrahams, M. (2008). Automatic Writing: Further Volumes of Philip M Parker. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/education/2008/feb/05/highereducation.research1 [accessed 30 April 2018].Google Scholar
Ackoff, R. (1989). From Data to Wisdom. Journal of Applied Systems Analysis, 16(1), 39.Google Scholar
ALAMO (n.d.). Alamo. www.alamo.free.fr [accessed 2 October 2018].Google Scholar
Amazon Customer. (2004, 12 February). Review of The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea, by James N. Parker M.D. Amazon, www.amazon.com/product-reviews/0597832129 [accessed 27 November 2016].Google Scholar
Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Anon. (1841a). From the Poughkeepsie Journal. – Hydraulic Poetry. Green Bay Republican, 1.Google Scholar
Anon(1841b). Machine Poetry. The Cincinnati Enquirer, 2.Google Scholar
Anon(1844). The New Patent Novel Writer. Punch, 6, 268.Google Scholar
Anon(1845). A Latin Hexameter Machine. The Athenæum, 921, 621.Google Scholar
Anon(1846). The Life of Wollaston. In The British Quarterly Review, vol. 4. London: Jacking & Walford, 81115.Google Scholar
Anon(2010). Robot with Mechanical Brain Thinks Up Story Plots (March 1931). Modern Mechanix. http://blog.modernmechanix.com/robot-with-mechanical-brain-thinks-up-story-plots [accessed 21 September 2017].Google Scholar
Anon(2016a). Oakville A’s 11U AAA (Mosquito) Outhits Vaughan in 7–3 Defeat. GameChanger. https://gc.com/game-57ca09c8348c02c25400003c/recap-story [accessed 24 March 2017].Google Scholar
Anon(2016b). Recap Stories Now Available in the App! GameChanger Blog. https://blog.gc.com/2016/07/18/recap-stories-app [accessed 26 November 2016].Google Scholar
Anon(2017). Majority of New Mothers in Wolverhampton Are Unmarried. Express & Star. www.expressandstar.com/news/local-hubs/wolverhampton/2017/11/29/majority-of-new-mothers-in-wolverhampton-are-unmarried [accessed 31 January 2019].Google Scholar
Anon(2019). Personalizing Commentary for Credit Insurance Allocation. Yseop. www.yseop.com/case-studies/personalizing-commentary-for-credit-insurance-allocation [accessed 12 March 2020].Google Scholar
Balpe, J-P. (1995). Pour une literature informatique: Un manifeste … . In Vuillemin, A. and Lenoble, M., eds., Littérature et informatique: La literature générée par ordinateur. Arras: Artois Presses Université, pp. 1932.Google Scholar
Barthes, R. (1977). The Death of the Author. In Heath, S., trans., Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press, pp. 142–8.Google Scholar
Beer, G. (2014). The Reader as Author. Authorship, 3(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.21825/aj.v3i1.1066 [accessed 3 May 2017].Google Scholar
Boden, M. A. (2010). Creativity and Art: Three Roads to Surprise. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bök, C. (2002). The Piecemeal Bard is Deconstructed: Notes Toward a Potential Robopoetics. Object 10: Cyberpoetics, 108. www.ubu.com/papers/object.html [accessed 28 October 2016].Google Scholar
Bolter, J. D. (1984). Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age. London: Duckworth.Google Scholar
Bolter, J. D. (1991). Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Booth, W. C. (1961). The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Borges, J. L. (1999). Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. In Hurley, A., trans., Collected Fictions. London: Penguin, pp. 8895.Google Scholar
Bosker, B. (2013). Philip Parker’s Trick For Authoring Over 1 Million Books: Don’t Write. HuffPost. www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/philip-parker-books_n_2648820 [accessed 30 April 2018].Google Scholar
Bowman, S. R., Vilnis, L., Vinyals, O., et al. (2016). Generating Sentences from a Continuous Space. In Proceedings of the 20th SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning. Berlin: Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 1021.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bryson, J. J. (2018). Patiency Is Not a Virtue: the Design of Intelligent Systems and Systems of Ethics. Ethics and Information Technology, 20, 1526.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
BTN.com Staff. (2012). First Quarter Recap: UNLV 3, Minnesota 0. Big Ten Network. http://btn.com/2012/08/30/first-quarter-track-minnesota-at-unlv [accessed 16 April 2018].Google Scholar
BTN.com staff(2013). Wisconsin Beats Michigan, 68–59. Big Ten Network. http://btn.com/2013/03/15/track-no-4-wisconsin-vs-no-5-michigan [accessed 26 November 2016].Google Scholar
Casebourne, I. (1996). The Grandmother Program: A Hybrid System for Automated Story Generation. In Creativity and Cognition 1996 Conference Proceedings. Loughborough: The Creativity and Cognition Studios, pp. 146–55.Google Scholar
Clarke, A. C. (2000). The Steam-Powered Word Processor. In The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, pp. 930–4 [first published in Analog, January 1986].Google Scholar
Cohen, N. (2008). He Wrote 200,000 Books (But Computers Did Some of the Work). The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/business/media/14link.html [accessed 30 April 2018].Google Scholar
Cook, W. W. (1928). Plotto: A New Method of Plot Suggestion for Writers of Creative Fiction. Battle Creek: Ellis Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Cowan, S. (2012). The Growth of Public Literacy in Eighteenth-Century England. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10019999/2/__d6_Shared$_SUPP_Library_User%20Services_Circulation_Inter-Library%20Loans_IOE%20ETHOS_EThOS%20-%20Redacted%20theses_COWAN,%20S_Redacted.pdf [accessed 21 November 2020].Google Scholar
Dahl, R. (1954). The Great Automatic Grammatisator. In Someone Like You. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, pp. 250–76.Google Scholar
Darnton, R. (1982). What Is the History of Books? Daedalus, 111(3), 6583.Google Scholar
Das, R., and Pavlíčková, T. (2013). Is There an Author Behind This Text? A Literary Aesthetic Driven Approach to Interactive Media. New Media & Society, 16(3), 381–97.Google Scholar
Deazley, R. (2008). Commentary on Millar v. Taylor (1769). Primary Sources on Copyright (1450–1900), ed. by Bently, Lionel and Kretschmer, Martin. www.copyrighthistory.org/cam/tools/request/showRecord?id=commentary_uk_1769 [accessed 20 June 2019].Google Scholar
Dehn, N. J. (1989). Computer Story-Writing: The Role of Reconstructive and Dynamic Memory. New Haven: Yale University Department of Computer Science.Google Scholar
Dennett, D. (1971). Intentional Systems. The Journal of Philosophy, 68(4), 87106.Google Scholar
Dennett, D. (1987). The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Dewdney, A. K. (1985). Artificial Insanity: When a Schizophrenic Program Meets a Computerized Analyst. Scientific American, 252(1), 103.Google Scholar
Downey, N. (2015, 8 March). Review of The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea, by James N. Parker M.D. Amazon. www.amazon.com/product-reviews/0597832129 [accessed 27 November 2016].Google Scholar
Eisenstein, E. L. (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Eureka AHRC Project. (n.d.) Alfred Gillett Trust. https://alfredgilletttrust.org/collections/latin-verse-machine [accessed 7 May 2019].Google Scholar
Eve, M. P. (2017). The Great Automatic Grammatizator: Writing, Labour, Computers. Critical Quarterly, 59(3), 3954.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Febvre, L., and Martin, H-J. (1997). The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800, trans. by Gerard, David. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Fischer, K., and Bateman, J. A. (2006). Keeping the Initiative: An Empirically-Motivated Approach to Predicting User-Initiated Dialogue Contribution in HCI. In Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Trento: Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 185–92.Google Scholar
Fish, S. (1980). Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. (1998). What Is an Author? In Faubion, J. D., ed. and Hurley, R. et al., trans., Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. New York: The New Press, pp. 205–22.Google Scholar
Gauchet, M. (2000). A New Age of Personality: An Essay on the Psychology of our Times. Thesis Eleven, 60, 2341.Google Scholar
Goldschmidt, E. P. (1943). Medieval Texts and Their First Appearance in Print. London: The Bibliographical Society.Google Scholar
Goody, J., and Watt, I. (1963). The Consequences of Literacy. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5(3), 304–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gregory, J., and Miller, S. (1998). Science in Public: Communication, Culture, and Credibility. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Hall, J. D. (2007). Popular Prosody: Spectacle and the Politics of Victorian Versification. Nineteenth-Century Literature, 62(2), 222–49.Google Scholar
Hall, J. D. (2017). Nineteenth-Century Verse and Technology: Machines of Meter. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartman, C. O. (1996). Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Havelock, E. A. (1980). The Coming of Literate Communication to Western Culture. Literacy and the Future of Print, 30(1), 90–8.Google Scholar
Hayles, N. K. (2005). My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Henrickson, L. (2018a). Computer-Generated Fiction in a Literary Lineage: Breaking the Hermeneutic Contract. Logos, 29(2–3), 5463.Google Scholar
Henrickson, L. (2019a). Natural Language Generation: Negotiating Text Production in Our Digital Humanity. Proceedings of the Digital Humanities Congress 2018. Sheffield: University of Sheffield. www.dhi.ac.uk/openbook/chapter/dhc2018-henrickson [accessed 28 February 2020].Google Scholar
Henrickson, L. (2018b). Tool vs. Agent: Attributing Agency to Natural Language Generation Systems. Digital Creativity, 29(2–3), 182–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henrickson, L. (2019b). ‘Towards a New Sociology of the Text: The Hermeneutics of Algorithmic Authorship’ Empirical Studies. Loughborough University Research Repository. https://doi.org/10.17028/rd.lboro.c.4663709 [accessed 28 February 2020].Google Scholar
Henrickson, L. (2019c). ‘Towards a New Sociology of the Text: The Concept of the Author in the Digital Age’ Focus Group Transcriptions. Loughborough University Research Repository. https://doi.org/10.17028/rd.lboro.7923944 [accessed 4 February 2020].Google Scholar
(2020). Authorship in Computer-Generated Texts. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1226 [accessed 18 August 2020].Google Scholar
Herman, D. (2008). Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance. Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 6(2), 233–60.Google Scholar
Hill, W. A. (1919). Ten Million Photoplay Plots. Los Angeles: Feature Photodrama.Google Scholar
Hofstadter, D. R. (1980). Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Houston, R. A. (1993). Literacy, Education and the Culture of Print in Enlightenment Edinburgh. History, 78(254), 373–92.Google Scholar
hugovk. (2014). 50,000 Meows. GitHub. https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014/issues/50 [accessed 29 August 2018].Google Scholar
ICON Group International. (n.d.) www.icongrouponline.com [accessed 25 November 2016].Google Scholar
Immersive Automation. (n.d.) http://immersiveautomation.com [accessed 1 October 2017].Google Scholar
Johnson, D. G. (2006). Computer Systems: Moral Entities But Not Moral Agents. Ethics and Information Technology, 8, 195204.Google Scholar
Karsdorp, F., Manjavacas, E., Burtenshaw, B., Kestemont, M., and Stokhuyzen, B. (2017). AsiBot. https://asibot.nl [accessed 17 December 2018].Google Scholar
Kazemi, D. (n.d.) NaNoGenMo. GitHub. https://nanogenmo.github.io [accessed 29 August 2018].Google Scholar
Kirschenbaum, M. (2015). What Is an @uthor? Los Angeles Review of Books. http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/uthor [accessed 7 February 2015].Google Scholar
Klein, S., Aeschlimann, J. F., Balsiger, D. F., et al. (1973). Automatic Novel Writing: A Status Report (Technical Report 186). Madison: The University of Wisconsin.Google Scholar
Koolhof, K. (2017). Ronald Giphart experimenteert met literaire robot. AD.nl. www.ad.nl/wetenschap/ronald-giphart-experimenteert-met-literaire-robot~a5a3cb9f [accessed 1 October 2017].Google Scholar
Krittman, D., Matthews, P., and Glascott, M. G. (2015). Innovation Ushers in the Modern Era of Compliance. Deloitte. www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/finance/us-fas-how-natural-language-is-changing-the-game-deloitte-only.pdf [accessed 15 March 2018].Google Scholar
Lake, R. W. (2017). Big Data, Urban Governance, and the Ontological Politics of Hyperindividualism. Big Data & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716682537 [accessed 1 July 2019].Google Scholar
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lebowitz, M. (1985). Story-Telling as Planning and Learning. Poetics, 14, 483502.Google Scholar
Lee, P. (2016). Learning From Tay’s Introduction. Official Microsoft Blog. http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/03/25/learning-tays-introduction [accessed 8 November 2016].Google Scholar
Leppänen, L., Munezero, M., Sirén-Heikel, S., Granroth-Wilding, M., & Toivonen, H. (2017). Finding and Expressing News From Structured Data. In Proceedings of the 21st International Academic Mindtrek Conference. Tampere: Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 174–83.Google Scholar
Lescure, J. (1973). La méthode S + 7 (cas particulier de la méthode M ± n). In La littérature potentielle (Créations, Re-créations, Récréations. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, pp. 143–8.Google Scholar
Malm, P. (2020). The Language Effect: Why AI-Powered Copywriting Is a Marketer’s (New) Best Friend. London: Known Publishing.Google Scholar
Manjavacas, E., Karsdorp, F., Burtenshaw, B., and Kestemont, M. (2017). Synthetic Literature: Writing Science Fiction in a Co-Creative Process. In Proceedings of the INLG 2017 Workshop on Computational Creativity and Natural Language Generation. Santiago de Compostela: Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 2937.Google Scholar
McDonald, D. D. (1986). Natural Language Generation: Complexities and Techniques [internal memo]. University of Massachusetts Department of Computer and Information Science. Amherst: University of Massachusetts.Google Scholar
McGuinness, R. (2014). Meet the Robots Writing Your News Articles: The Rise of Automated Journalism. Metro. http://metro.co.uk/2014/07/10/meet-the-robots-writing-your-news-articles-the-rise-of-automated-journalism-4792284 [accessed 30 April 2018].Google Scholar
McKenzie, D. F. (1999). Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McLuhan, M. (1994). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
McLuhan, M., Fiore, Q., and Agel, J. (1967). The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York: Bantam Books.Google Scholar
Meehan, J. R. (1976). The Metanovel: Writing Stories by Computer. Unpublished Ph.D thesis, Yale University. www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Metanovel%3A-Writing-Stories-by-Computer-Meehan/35f03721ecef2a7315a8d85d02bacaf00660a3fb [accessed 21 November 2020].Google Scholar
Menabrea, L. F. (1843). Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, Esq. In Lovelace, A. A., trans., Taylor, R., ed., Scientific Memoirs, Selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of Science and Learned Societies, and from Foreign Journals, Vol. III. London: Richard and John E. Taylor, pp. 666731.Google Scholar
Method and Apparatus for Automated Authoring and Marketing (US 7266767 B2). (2006). Google Patents. https://patents.google.com/patent/US7266767 [accessed 9 October 2017].Google Scholar
Michael, M. (2014). How to Understand Mundane Technology: New Ways of Thinking about Human-Technology Relations. In Dakers, J. R., ed., Defining Technological Literacy: Towards an Epistemological Framework, 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 4156.Google Scholar
Mittelstadt, B. D., Allo, P., Taddeo, M., Wachter, S., and Floridi, L. (2016). The Ethics of Algorithms: Mapping the Debate. Big Data & Society, 3(2), 121.Google Scholar
Montal, T., and Reich, Z. (2017). I, Robot. You, Journalist. Who is the Author? Digital Journalism, 5(7), 829–49.Google Scholar
Montfort, N. (2005). Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Montfort, N., and Fedorova, N. (2012). Small-Scale Systems and Computational Creativity. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computational Creativity. Dublin: Association for Computational Creativity, pp. 82–6.Google Scholar
Motta, M. (2018). The Dynamics and Political Implications of Anti-Intellectualism in the United States. American Politics Research, 43(3), 465–98.Google Scholar
Murray, S. (2018a). The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Murray, S. (2018b). Reading Online: Updating the State of the Discipline. Book History, 21, 370–96.Google Scholar
Nass, C., and Moon, Y. (2000). Machines and Mindlessness: Social Responses to Computers. Journal of Social Issues, 56(1), 81103.Google Scholar
Nass, C., Steuer, J., & Tauber, E. R. (1994). Computers are Social Actors. In CHI ‘94 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Boston: Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 72–8.Google Scholar
Natale, S. (in press). Deceitful Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works. (1979). Final Report of the National Commission of New Technological Uses of Copyright Works. Washington: Library of Congress.Google Scholar
Nehamas, A. (1986). What an Author Is. The Journal of Philosophy, 83(11), 685–91.Google Scholar
Nuttall, P. A. (1845). The Eureka. In Agnew (ed.), J. Holmes, The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art. New York: Leavitt, Trow, & Co., pp. 140–1.Google Scholar
Parker, P. M. (2006a). The 2007 Report on Facial Tissue Stock Excluding Toweling, Napkin, and Toilet Paper: World Market Segmentation by City. Las Vegas: Icon Group International.Google Scholar
Parker, P. M. (2006b). The 2007–2012 Outlook for Instant Chocolate Milk, Weight Control Products, Whole Milk Powder, Malted Milk Powder, and Other Dry Milk Products Shipped in Consumer Packages Weighing 3 Pounds or Less Excluding Nonfat Dry Milk and Infants’ Formula in Japan. Las Vegas: Icon Group International.Google Scholar
Parker, P. M. (2007). Webster’s Swedish to English Crossword Puzzles: Level 1. Las Vegas: Icon Group International.Google Scholar
Parrish, A. (2015). Our Arrival: A Novel. http://s3.amazonaws.com/aparrish/our-arrival.pdf [accessed 29 August 2018].Google Scholar
Pavlíčková, T. (2013). Bringing the Author Back Into the Audience Research: A Hermeneutical Perspective on the Audience’s Understanding of the Author. The Communication Review, 16(1–2), 31–9.Google Scholar
Peter, J. (1677). Artificial Versifying | A New Way to Make Latin Verſes. Whereby Any one of Ordinary Capacity, that only knows the A.B.C. And can count 9 (though he understands not One Word of Latin, or what a Verſe means) may be plainly taught (and in as little time, as this is reading over) how to make Thouſands of Hexameter and Pentameter Verſes which ſhall be True Latine & True Verſe, and Good Senſe., 2nd ed. London: Kings-Head at Sweetings-Alley end, next House to the Royal Exchange in Corn-hill.Google Scholar
Pinch, T. J., and Bijker, W. E. (1984). The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other. Social Studies of Science, 14, 399441.Google Scholar
Podolny, S. (2015). If an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know? The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/opinion/sunday/if-an-algorithm-wrote-this-how-would-you-even-know.html [accessed 30 April 2018].Google Scholar
Polti, G. (1895). Les trente-six situations dramatiques. Paris: Mercure de France.Google Scholar
Portela, M. (2018). Writing under Constraint of the Regime of Computation. In Tabbi, J., ed., The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 181200.Google Scholar
Powers, T. M. (2013). On the Moral Agency of Computers. Topoi, 32(2), 227–36.Google Scholar
Prescott, T. J. (2017). Robots Are Not Just Tools. Connection Science, 29(2), 142–9.Google Scholar
Racter [Chamberlain, W., and Etter, T. ]. (1984). The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed. New York: Warner Software/Warner Books.Google Scholar
Radford, A., Wu, J., Amodei, D., et al. (2019). Better Language Models and Their Implications. OpenAI. https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models [accessed 20 August 2020].Google Scholar
Ray Murray, P., and Squires, C. (2013). The Digital Publishing Communications Circuit. Book 2.0, 3(1), 323.Google Scholar
Reeves, B., and Nass, C. (1996). The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Regan, D. (2015). The Cover of The Sun Also Rises. GitHub. http://alsorises.org [accessed 29 August 2018].Google Scholar
Roberts, S. (2017). Christopher Strachey’s Nineteen-Fifties Love Machine. The New Yorker. www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/christopher-stracheys-nineteen-fifties-love-machine [accessed 11 March 2019].Google Scholar
Ryan, J. (2017). Grimes’ Fairy Tales: A 1960s Story Generator. In Interactive Storytelling: 10th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling. Cham: Springer, pp. 89103.Google Scholar
Saenger, P. (1999). Reading in the Later Middle Ages. In Cavallo, G. and Chartier, R., eds., Cochrane, L. G., trans., A History of Reading in the West. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 120–48.Google Scholar
Schoff Curtin, R. (2017). The Transactional Origins of Authors’ Copyright. The Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts, 40(2), 175235.Google Scholar
Searle, J. R. (1980). Minds, Brains, and Programs. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(3) 417–57.Google Scholar
Shillingsburg, P. L. (2006). From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Skains, R. L. (2019). Digital Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Smiggy. (2002, 19 December). Follow Your Nose, Couldn’t Put It Down! [Customer Review]. Review of The 2007 Report on Facial Tissue Stock Excluding Toweling, Napkin, and Toilet Paper: World Market Segmentation by City, by Philip M. Parker. Amazon. www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/RCNPTIBJJNAQV [accessed 30 April 2018].Google Scholar
Spence, P. R., Edwards, A., Edwards, C., and Jin, X. (2019). ‘The Bot Predicted Rain, Grab an Umbrella’: Few Perceived Differences in Communication Quality of a Weather Twitterbot Versus Professional and Amateur Meteorologists. Behaviour & Information Technology, 38(1), 101–9.Google Scholar
Stahl, B. C. (2004). Information, Ethics, and Computers: The Problem of Autonomous Moral Agents. Minds and Machines, 14(1), 6783.Google Scholar
Tang, J., Yang, Y., Carton, S., Zhang, M., and Mei, Q. (2016). Context-Aware Natural Language Generation with Recurrent Neural Networks. Cornell University Library (arXiv) https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.09900 [accessed 25 June 2017].Google Scholar
Teigen, P. M. (1987). A Prolegomenon to the Interpretation of The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. In McNally, P. F., ed., The Advent of Printing: Historians of Science Respond to Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Montreal: McGill University, pp. 814.Google Scholar
Tenen, D. (2017). Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Tomasula, S. (2018). Our Tools Make Us (and Our Literature) Post. In Tabbi, J., ed., The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 3958.Google Scholar
Turner, S. R. (1993). MINSTREL: A Computer Model of Creativity and Storytelling. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of California Los Angeles. www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Minstrel%3A-a-computer-model-of-creativity-and-Turner/745b24c90f089339f7e9e2209d4acebfb2f1ec82 [accessed 21 November 2020].Google Scholar
Urbs Media. (n.d.). www.urbsmedia.com [accessed 25 February 2018].Google Scholar
Valtteri (n.d.) [archived by Internet Archive]. https://web.archive.org/web/20190120010217/https://www.vaalibotti.fi [accessed 18 August 2020].Google Scholar
van der Weel, A. (2001). The Communications Circuit Revisited. Jaarboek voor Nederlandse boekgeschiedenis, 8, 1325.Google Scholar
van der Weel, A. (2011a). Changing Our Textual Minds: Towards a Digital Order of Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
van der Weel, A. (2011b). Our Textual Future. Logos, 22(3), 4452.Google Scholar
van der Weel, A. (2014). From an Ownership to an Access Economy of Publishing. Logos, 25(2), 3946.Google Scholar
van der Weel, A. (2015). Appropriation: Towards a Sociotechnical History of Authorship. Authorship, 4(2). https://doi.org/10.21825/aj.v4i2.1438 [accessed 1 July 2019].Google Scholar
Vuillemin, A., and Lenoble, M., eds. (1995). Littérature et informatique: La literature générée par ordinateur. Arras: Artois Presses Université.Google Scholar
Weizenbaum, J. (1966). ELIZA – A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine. Communications of the ACM, 9(1), 3645.Google Scholar
Whalen, Z. (2018a). A Python Script that Writes 800-page Children’s Books. Zach Whalen. www.zachwhalen.net/posts/a-python-script-that-writes-800-page-childrens-books [accessed 30 August 2018].Google Scholar
Whalen, Z. (2018b). The Several Houses of Brian, Spencer, Liam, Victoria, Brayden, Vincent, and Alex. GitHub. https://github.com/zachwhalen/nngm17 [accessed 28 August 2018].Google Scholar
Whalen, Z. (2019). The Many Authors of The Several Houses of Brian, Spencer, Liam, Victoria, Brayden, Vincent, and Alex: Authorship, Agency, and Appropriation. Journal of Creative Writing Studies, 4(1) https://scholarworks.rit.edu/jcws/vol4/iss1/6. [accessed 20 July 2020].Google Scholar
Wiener, N. (1950). The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode.Google Scholar
Wilson, A. (2004). Foucault on the ‘Question of the Author’: A Critical Exegesis. The Modern Language Review, 99(2), 339–63.Google Scholar
Winograd, T. (1971). Procedures as a Representation for Data in a Computer Program for Understanding Natural Language. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7095 [accessed 21 November 2020].Google Scholar

Save element to Kindle

To save this element to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Reading Computer-Generated Texts
Available formats
×

Save element to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Reading Computer-Generated Texts
Available formats
×

Save element to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Reading Computer-Generated Texts
Available formats
×