Writing With and Beyond AI: Fieldnotes from Computer-Mediated Poetry
Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and the School of Information
It is obvious by now that large language models can make writing mind-numbingly efficient. In this talk, I pursue a different proposition: the point of writing with AI should be to write — and thus to think — what we could not or would not have done alone (and, likewise, what AI itself could not generate).
Drawing from my own experience writing literary texts with algorithmic feedback (in my book Gyms [dispersed holdings, 2025] and related projects), I suggest some rather extreme ways of straining the writer’s mind far beyond its usual ambit. I also point to some dangers specific to collaborating with LLM-based systems, especially their tendency to produce bland, derivative “slop,” and conclude with thoughts on how the field of cultural analytics might be put to work in the war against slop.
The Cultural Analytics Series is a series of lunchtime talks and workshops highlighting research that focuses on the data-driven analysis of cultural phenomena.
| Time | Event |
|---|---|
| 12:15 pm | Pre-talk lunch |
| 12:30 pm | Talk |
Speaker
Kyle Booten
Kyle Booten is an assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is a scholar-practitioner whose research and creative work explore the algorithmic mediation of human thinking, especially poetic thinking.
His most recent book is Gyms (dispersed holdings, 2025), a book of poetry written with and against nine different algorithmic “word gyms” designed to make writing more strenuous. Booten is also the author of Salon des Fantômes: Or, Streptohormetic Prompt Engineering for the Production of a Jagged Noetic Substrate (Inside the Castle, 2024), the documentation of a weeklong philosophical and artistic salon at which he was the only non-AI participant.
His current monograph project is titled Noöhacking. If mainstream digital media tends to “hack” our attention to disastrous effect, we can resist this noetic disaster not by retreating to anti-digital hermeticism but by re-hacking our minds—building our own small-scale cognitive infrastructures that manipulate and retune our attention. At once theoretical and design-oriented, Noöhacking reimagines the notion of care in a posthuman direction, in light of the modes of solicitude proper to algorithmic media.
Booten’s research — rooted in the humanities (especially media studies and digital humanities) but making frequent excursions into media arts and design, human-computer interaction, and even natural language processing — has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as Critical AI, electronic book review, Debates in Digital Humanities, Flusser Studies, xCoAx, Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and Creativity & Cognition.
With Katy Ilonka Gero, Booten edits Ensemble Park: A Journal of Human+Computer Writing.
Contact
If you have questions about this event, please contact Lilli Wessling Hart at lilli@berkeley.edu.
Getting to South Hall
Accessibility
If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting, CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about mobility access in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Heather Rapp with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7–10 days in advance of the event.
