Ghosts, Robots, Automatic Writing

As language generating AI grows more sophisticated, new questions arise (and old questions take on new significance) about the nature of originality, authorship, influence, truth, knowledge, freedom, the human and the machine.

Ghosts, Robots, Automatic Writing: an AI Level Study Guide is the result of a two-year long collaboration between Anne Alexander, Caroline Bassett, Alan Blackwell, and Jo Lindsay Walton. It was shaped by discussion with dozens of participants in an online workshop series hosted by Cambridge Digital Humanities Learning Programme and the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and sits somewhere between speculative fiction, scholarly essay, and being a primer about an emerging technology.

The actual date of publication is 2021, but readers are asked to imagine when they read it that they are living in a future where Automatic Writing has made it into school literature curricula and onto the syllabus for undergraduate degrees. Consider it a textbook for the future, and a textbook from the future.