Grand Text Auto

I’m in Canada today — Toronto, specifically — to celebrate the publication of

Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023. (ed. Lillian-Yvonne Bertram & Nick Montfort, MIT Press & Counterpath 2024) in conversation with Matt Nish-Lapidus and with a reading by Kavi Davvoori. I haven’t been here very long, and the Output event doesn’t start for an hour and fifteen minutes, but I’ve already enjoyed walking from the airport, and then around town, not to mention consuming a smoked meat omelette.

All the Way for the Win was just published by Penteract Press — today! It’s available for sale from their online store.

This book of poetry begins by narrating the birth of the universe and concludes after describing the eradication of the last human-authored poetic text.

While it doesn’t deal with everything in between, it’s mean to touch on many aspects of human history and experience.

The poems in the book consist entirely of three-letter words.

Six of the poems from it were published at the very end of 2024 in DIAGRAM.

The book has received two great endorsements:

It’s already been a full month since the most recent

National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo 2024). I surely should have written up some thoughts sooner. Other computer-generated texts have kept me busy, though!

The anthology I edited with Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023, was published on November 5 and we’ve been going to discuss it, read from it, and hear people’s reactions. More information about Output can be found in my previous blog post, which I’m updating to reflect upcoming events.

The new book, edited by Réjane Dreifuss / Simon Hagemann / Izabella Pluta (eds.)

Live Performance and Video Games Inspirations, Appropriations and Mutual Transfers 2024.

Narrative strategies, immersion, interaction, participation, identification, multimodality, characters and the connection between physical and fictional or virtual worlds: the fields of inquiry into the complex relationship between live performance and video games are numerous and diverse. For the first time, this collection brings together international researchers and artists to explore this relationship in a variety of essays. The contributors to this volume focus on reciprocal inspirations, appropriations and transfers applied by theatre artists, game designers and researchers. They analyze several artistic forms such as VR performance, immersive theatre, speedrunning or game theatre.

I’m delighted that after more than four years of work by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and myself — co-editors of this book — the MIT Press and Counterpath have jointly published

This anthology spans seven decades of computer-generated text, beginning before the term “artificial intelligence” was even coined. While not restricted to poetry, fiction, and other creative projects, it reveals the rich work that has been done by artists, poets, and other sorts of writers who have taken computing and code into their own hands. The anthology includes examples of powerful and principled rhetorical generation along with story generation systems based on cognitive research. There are examples of “real news” generation that has already been informing us — along with hoaxes and humor.

Mary is to keynote the fantastic 20th annual Women in Games on Friday October 11^th, the Day of the Girl, our virtual conference has a focussed theme of PLAY GROUNDED: An Exploration of Play Landscapes, which is curated through the lens of Women in Games.

SHERI GRANER RAY, MARY FLANAGAN & APHRA KERR TO KEYNOTE WIG CONFERENCE

The Strong Museum’s American Journal of Play team interviewed Mary about games, art and critical play! Read the interview here.

Taper, an online literary magazine published twice yearly, is now in its 12th issue. An independent editorial collective (Kyle Booten, Angela Chang, Kavi Duvvoori, Leonardo Flores, Helen Shewolfe Tseng, and Andy Wallace, for this issue) makes all the decisions about selections, themes for forthcoming issues, and so on, and also handles all communication with authors. They do all the work! Editors are allowed to submit works, in which case they recuse themselves from the collective’s discussion. I’m proud to be publisher of this magazine — although it’s really the editorial collective that makes it happen.

Professor Flanagan participated in the Ditchley Foundation’s thinktank on the “Impact of AI on work and education.” Focusing on the large questions of our time, the group debated questions such as, “Should we be adopting a precautionary principle, waiting to see what unwanted effects might emerge? Or does that risk companies being outcompeted, and, in education, students left unprepared for the world of work they will be entering? Should students and teachers be encouraged to embrace AI now to learn through experimentation, or is that premature? and “If work is changing, then how does education need to adapt in response in order to prepare people to enter the world of work?”

February 14 is Valentine’s Day for many; this year, it’s also Ash Wednesday for Western Christians, both Orthodox and unorthodox. Universally, it is Harry Mathews’s birthday. Harry, who would have been 94 today, was an amazing experimental writer. He’s known to many as the first American to join the Oulipo.

Given the occasion, I thought I’d write a blog post, which I do very rarely these days, to discuss my poetics — or, because mine is a poetics of concision, my “poetix.” Using that word saves one byte. The term may also suggest an underground poetix, as with comix, and this is great.

Card games are more often associated with family-gatherings or leisurely afternoons than with realizing social change. However, one group of game designers is creating games with an aim to do just that.

Tiltfactor Lab, a Dartmouth College research laboratory with Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor Mary Flanagan at the helm, is dedicated to “creating games for social change.” They designed and produce Buffalo—described by Amazon reviewers as an “extremely simple,” “adaptable” party game—and Awkward Moment—and is “an interesting, family-friendly card game that is worthy of your attention” and “makes you laugh”— provide more than just endless fun at parties. According to a paper to be printed in CyberPsychology’s upcoming issue devoted to the prosocial effects of games, Buffalo and Awkward Moment are also games with a proven purpose. These games have been shown to change players’ implicit biases without them ever knowing!

SPIEL Essen is one of the world’s largest board game conventions boasting of roughly 1000 exhibitiors and over 150,000 visitors annually. Professor Flanagan attended this year’s extravaganza, meeting with many game designers and publishers.

Hypertherm is a 100% employee-owned company focusing on industrial cutting technologies and solutions and is leading the industry in this area. Their local campus in Lebanon, NH invited Tiltfactor to their annual human resources retreat in an effort to seek advice about how to enhance employee experience at the company. Max engaged the staff in game play and discussion, sharing the Tiltfactor method of Embedded Design, and how it can be used to foster a fun and inclusive work environment.

Homo Ludens, a youtube channel dedicated to history and board games, featured Mary Flanagan along with other game professionals and researchers in a stream that aired on Feb 27. The discussion centered around the evolution, ethics, and history of colonialist depiction in board games and tabletop wargames. Watch “Game Ethics #2: Playing Colonialism” here.

Glitch Squad was created in a collaboration between Professor Mary Flanagan’s game design publishing company, Resonym, LabX, a public engagement test bed at the National Academy of Sciences, and Tiltfactor Lab. The game is designed to interest the public on issues surrounding forensic science.

The goal of the National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communication is to “encourage high-quality science communication and build a diverse community of science journalists, research scientists, and institutions that will help society meet the challenges and opportunities posed by climate change, future pandemics, human genome editing, and other issues that can only be understood and navigated with the help of effective science communication.” These annual awards, give to 24 exceptional writers, total $60,000. Professor Flanagan was among the jury members in 2022 and will continue into the 2023 award cycle. Says Flanagan, “It was a lot of work but such great writing— what a pleasure!”

Edward Schiappa, Professor of Rhetoric
Nick Montfort, Professor of Digital Media
10 January 2023

[In response to a request, this is an HTML version of a PDF memo for our colleagues at MIT]

There has been a noticeable increase in student use of AI assistance for writing recently. Instructors have expressed concerns and have been seeking guidance on how to deal with systems such as GPT-3, which is the basis for the very recent ChatGPT. The following thoughts on this topic are advisory from the two of us: They have no official standing within even our department, and certainly not within the Institute. Nonetheless, we hope you find them useful.

PAX Unplugged is an annual tabletop game convention in Philadelphia, PA in December. This year, Professor Mary Flanagan’s game studio Resonym featured two games at the convention: Phantom Ink and Retrograde. Joined by Tiltfactor alum Lucas Sanford-Long (Dart ’12), Tiltfactor’s staff Max Seidman (Dart ’12) and Sukie Punjasthitkul, Mary and the crew enjoyed a productive 3 days, and even a surprise visit from Geoff Kaufman, former Tilt research guru!

Professor Flanagan’s game company Resonym has introduced two new games this year: Phantom Ink and Retrograde. Her recent trip to Gen Con indicated that Phantom Ink is a huge hit already with gamers, families, and enthusiasts! On the writing front, 2023 will begin for Flanagan with the introduction of her new book entitled Playful Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Board Games – MIT Press. This book is the result of several years of research and travel throughout Europe, focusing on Germany and France.

Professor Mary Flanagan delivered the keynote talk at Gen Con this summer. Gen Con is one of the largest gaming conventions in North America and is held annually in Indianapolis, IN.

PortrAIts: Digital Portraiture & Social Identity opened in the BVAC Student Gallery on Tuesday, May 24th with a small but very engaged crowd of viewers. The interactive exhibition explored how artificial intelligence visually reproduces existing forms of bias in our digital commons. The show featured a series of digital portraits created by using a text-to-image generative algorithm trained on large datasets of images sourced from the internet. Viewers were be able to participate in the generation of AI art and engage in critical conversations about the work.

In our second installment of our Glitch Lab Student Spotlights, we hear from Egemin Sahin ’23 about his work experimenting with and researching various A.I.s for our project.

Can you tell us a little more about yourself and what you do in the lab?

I’m Egemin, I’m a ’23 double majoring in Math and C.S., modified with Music. In the lab, I come up with ideas for what kinds of A.I.s we want to use, I do a lot of literature reviews on how we can implement these ideas into the computer, basically. Also I experiment with the A.I. itself after I put it on there. I’m more of an A.I. applicator, I guess you could call it that.

This winter, the GLITCHLab’s started meeting in person for weekly lab hours in which we collaborate on our most recent projects, swap ideas, and get to know each other better. As the designated documentarian of the group, I recently had the chance to interview Clara Pakman ’23 on her thoughts about our project and the work that she does for the team!

Can you tell us a little more about yourself and what you do in the lab?

We’re happy to announce that Tiltfactor is the proud recipient of an Arts Integration Initiative Grant from the Hopkins Center for the Arts to sponsor our student and faculty-led work. Our ongoing project is focused on using feminist AI to explore gender bias in art and create new works from female artists.

The Arts Integration Initiative “is part of the Hop’s Arts at the Core Initiative which aims to enrich disparate areas of study through the arts and to support an arts-infused network of students, faculty and artists.”