The great automatic grammatizator: Writing, labour, computers

Abstract

What does it actually mean when we say that computers can ‘write’, and how are recent developments in neural networks and machine learning changing this capacity? This article examines the long-standing literary fear of authorship being replaced by machines while also interrogating the labour and credit implications that sit behind widely used structures of authorship in a technological age. The argument makes reference to one work of computer-generated writing – Johannes Heldén and Håkan Jonson’s Evolution (2014) – and to one software paradigm (character-based recurrent neural networks for language acquisition trained on the corpus of the journal Textual Practice). I here argue that unless we conceive more broadly of the criteria for ‘authorship’ as a labour function, and unless we take seriously the need to see textual production as social production, hybridised (but predominantly) machine identities will come to dominate a literary landscape.