Hosted by the Humanities Center and faculty co-teaching fellows, Annette Vee and Matthew Burton. Respondents include Miranda Bartira Tagliari Sousa (Music), Briana Wipf (English), and Antonio Byrd (English, University of Missouri-Kansas City). This event will be hybrid, so you can attend it either in person in 602 CL or via Zoom as you prefer.

In this colloquium discussion, we delve into the interdisciplinary syllabus for a new undergraduate joint SCI/English course titled "Writing Machines," sponsored by a Humanities Center Co-Teaching Grant. Within the undergraduate gen ed structure and the Digital Narrative and Interactive Design (DNID) major, we aim to bridge the gap between critical and technical facets of natural language generation (NLG). "Writing Machines" navigates the historical context of writing automation, tracing its origins from Enlightenment mechanical automata to Markov models, templates, expert systems, and present-day AI-driven systems like ChatGPT. Students engage in practical exercises, including text generation using the Python programming language and experimentation with historical writing machines. Readings represent historical and contemporary NLG discourse from history, information studies, computer science, and writing studies, including work from Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, Safiya Noble, Jessica Riskin, and Ted Underwood. The automation of writing--now pervasive in medical, legal, social, and journalistic contexts through large language models (LLMs) using machine learning--has long been a crucible for questions of authorship, ownership, human consciousness, and cutting-edge computational techniques. It is also a rapidly evolving space with significant potential for research and commercial applications—as well as deep harm to people, especially those in marginalized communities (Bender, et al.). Using activities and analysis that break down this complex technology, this course helps students to understand both how these systems work and how they might work better. We invite responses to the shared draft syllabus and assignments, including participants' ideas around assessment, suggested texts, projects, and curricular positioning.