Cybernetics, Literary Ghosts and the Italian Way

"Will we have a machine capable of replacing the poet and the author?" the Italian writer Italo Calvino asked in 1967, predicting that computers would write "literature." In 1962 poet Nanni Balestrini instructed a computer to write a poem eager to hear "the voice of the machine." Thanks to ChatGPT, GPT3 and AI novels, non-fiction books, media, music and videos are composed through algorithms in a digital Renaissance. How do we instruct a computer to write a novel? Should we use algorithms or machine learning? Class will experiment with machine writing, its role on disinformation and the polarization of politics.