Congratulations to Dennis Yi Tenen (Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature) on the publication of his new book, Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write (W.W. Norton, 2024). Read reviews in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune.
Read in Columbia NewsLiterary Theory for Robots, the new book by Dennis Yi Tenen, an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature, explores the history of modern machine intelligence, taking readers on a journey that includes medieval Arabic philosophy, visions of a universal language, Hollywood fiction factories, and missile defense systems trained on Russian folktales. In his reflection on the shared pasts of literature and computer science, Tenen, a former Microsoft engineer, provides crucial context for recent developments in AI.