Interdisciplinary Topics:

3 units

The current topic for this class will provide students the opportunity to work on a project that uses GPT to study literature. Generative AI systems like ChatGPT are changing the way we understand human creativity and the cultural record. The project leverages GPT to analyze literary history: the project uses computational tools (e.g., natural language processing) to compare synthetic texts generated by GPT to authentic texts written by canonical authors (including Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain). Our goal is to better understand GPT's construction of the literary and to better understand how specific authors are remembered and canonized. Students will gain hands-on project experience, including project management and organization experience. The course will begin with readings on GPT and on Computational Literary Analysis and will evolve to focus primarily on supervised project work.