<aside> 😌 Please check this before each week’s class as there might be some small changes. Each week, we will be workshopping different ways of working with AI, roughly following the research process: research / reading / annotating → drafting / writing → editing / publishing, using AI at each stage.

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Week 1, 21st March. Introduction.

This week: two much-discussed articles about GenAI in popular press; explore the basic history of artificial intelligence both as a specific technology that culminates in large language models, and as an ancient human desire to create an autonomous nonhuman mind; do some very basic practice with reading tools.

• [concepts] Ted Chiang, ChatGPT is a Blurry JPG of the Web, New Yorker, 2023.
• [case study] Kevin Roose, A Conversation with Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled (including full transcript of the conversation), New York Times, 2023.

Week 2, 28th March. Collaborative AI Writing Practices in Arts and Culture.

This week: one article on media co-creation with nonhuman systems and three different cases studies of AI use for writing; more advanced co-reading practice; three different approaches to writing with AI; basic mentions of recent turn in philosophy towards ‘humans are not so unique.’

• [concepts] Katerina Cizek and William Uricho, Media Co-creation with Nonhuman Systems, Collective Wisdom, MIT Press, 2019.
• [case study: essaysim, nonfiction, creative writing] Ghosts by Vauhini Vara + listen to a podcast with her explaining how she used ChatGPT to write it.
• [case study: experimental literature] A short excerpt from Kenric Allado-McDowell, *Pharmako-AI,* Ignota Books, 2022.
  • [concepts] Allado McDowell’s interview with Nora N. Khan about their writing process with GPT. Check out their website as well.
  • (optional) [philosophy] Kenric Allado-McDowell and Francesco Bentivegna, Cybernetic Animism: Voice and AI in Conversation, Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, vol.7, no.1. 107-118.
• [case study: media theory, philosophy of technology] Ethan Plaue, William Morgan, and GPT-3, Secrets and Machines: A Conversation with GPT-3, e-flux, 2021. At least read the beginning to see what their methods for producing the texts were & GPT3 response. Their further analysis is optional to read.

[SPRING BREAK — NO CLASS]

Week 3, April 11th. AI & (Digital) Culture.

This week: one article on history of machines & creativity before and after computation, and one highly critical blog about the end of the internet due to AI content; prompting and writing practice.

• [history and concepts] Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Art in the Age of Machine Intelligence, 2017.
• [panic] Edward Zitron, Are we Watching the Internet Die? , 2024.

Week 4, April 18th. Machine Whisperer: Synthetic Language & Prompt Engineering.

This week: read one article on philosophy of large language models; more prompting and writing practice; group work preparation!

• [concepts] Benjamin Bratton and Blaise Arcas, The Model is the Message, Noema, 2023.

Week 5, April 25th. Already Cyborg: AI Co-writer, Co-editor, Tutor.