Generative literature is poetry or fiction that is automatically generated, often using computers. It is a genre of

electronic literature Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or Generative literature, algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature ar ...

, and also related to

generative art Generative art is post-conceptual art that has been created (in whole or in part) with the use of an autonomous system. An ''autonomous system'' in this context is generally one that is non-human and can independently determine features of an ...

. John Clark's Latin Verse Machine (1830–1843) is probably the first example of mechanised generative literature, while

Christopher Strachey Christopher S. Strachey (; 16 November 1916 – 18 May 1975) was a British computer scientist. He was one of the founders of denotational semantics, and a pioneer in programming language design and computer time-sharing.F. J. Corbató, et al., T ...

's love letter generator (1952) is the first digital example. With the

large language models A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with Self-supervised learning, self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially Natural language generation, language g ...

(LLMs) of the 2020s, generative literature is becoming increasingly common.

Definitions

Hannes Bajohr defines generative literature as literature involving "the automatic production of text according to predetermined parameters, usually following a combinatory, sometimes aleatory logic, and it emphasizes the production rather than the reception of the work (unlike, say, hypertext)." In his book ''Electronic Literature'',

Scott Rettberg Scott Rettberg is an American digital artist and scholar of electronic literature based in Bergen, Norway. He is the co-founder and served as the first executive director of the Electronic Literature Organization. He leads the Center for Digita ...

connects generative literature to avant-garde literary movements like

Dada Dada () or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin. Within a few years, the movement had s ...

Surrealism Surrealism is an art movement, art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike s ...

Oulipo Oulipo (, short for ; roughly translated as "workshop of potential literature", stylized ''OuLiPo'') is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques. It wa ...

and

Fluxus Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers, and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental performance art, art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finishe ...

. Bajohr argues that conceptual art is also an important reference.

Paradigms of generative literature

Bajohr describes two main paradigms of generative literature: the ''sequential paradigm'', where the text generation is "executed as a sequence of rule-steps" and employs linear

algorithms In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for per ...

, and the ''connectionist paradigm'', which is based on neural nets. The latter leads to what Bajohr calls a ''algorithmic empathy:'' "a non-anthropocentric empathy aimed not at the psychological states of the artists but at understanding the process of the work’s material production."

Poetry generation

The first examples of automated generative literature are poetry: John Clark's mechanical Latin Verse Machine (1830–1843) produced lines of hexameter verse in Latin, and

's love letter generator (1952), programmed on the

Manchester Mark 1 The Manchester Mark 1 was one of the earliest stored-program computers, developed at the Victoria University of Manchester, England from the Manchester Baby (operational in June 1948). Work began in August 1948, and the first version was operat ...

computer, generated short, satirical love letters. Examples of generative poetry using

artificial neural networks In machine learning, a neural network (also artificial neural network or neural net, abbreviated ANN or NN) is a computational model inspired by the structure and functions of biological neural networks. A neural network consists of connected ...

include

David Jhave Johnston David Jhave Johnston is a Canadian poet, videographer, and motion graphics artist working chiefly in digital and computational media,. and a researcher at the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen. This artist's work is often ...

ReRites ''ReRites'' (also known as ''RERITES, ReadingRites, Big Data Poetry'') is a literary work of "Human + A.I. poetry" by David Jhave Johnston that used neural network models trained to generate poetry which the author then edited. ''ReRites'' won the ...

Narrative generation

Story generators have often followed specific narratological theories of how stories are constructed. An early example is Grimes' Fairy Tales, the "first to take a grammar-based approach and the first to operationalize Propp's famous model." Mike Sharples and Rafael Peréz y Peréz's book ''Story Machines'' gives a detailed history of story generation. ''Storyland'' by Nanette Wylde is an example of generative narrative. Jonathan Baillehache compares ''Storyland'' to

Surrealist Surrealism is an art movement, art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike s ...

writing. Baillehache states, "When compared to earlier uses of chance operation in literature, a piece like this one resembles some of the automatic writings produced by

André Breton André Robert Breton (; ; 19 February 1896 – 28 September 1966) was a French writer and poet, the co-founder, leader, and principal theorist of surrealism. His writings include the first ''Surrealist Manifesto'' (''Manifeste du surréalisme'') ...

and

Philippe Soupault Philippe Soupault (2 August 1897 – 12 March 1990) was a French writer and poet, novelist, critic, and political activist. He was active in Dadaism and later was instrumental in founding the Surrealist movement with André Breton. Soupault ini ...

in their collective work ''The Magnetic Fields''. . . The difference between Nanette Wylde’s ''Storyland'' and Breton and Soupault’s ''Magnetic Fields'' is that the former is produced according to a computational algorithm involving randomizers and user interaction, and the latter by two free-wheeling human subjects."{{Cite journal , last=Baillehache , first=Jonathan , date=2013 , title=Chance Operations and Randomizers in Avant-garde and Electronic Poetry: Tying Media to Language , url=https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/textual/article/view/5049 , journal=Textual Cultures , language=en , volume=8 , issue=1 , pages=38–56 , doi=10.14434/TCv8i1.5049 , issn=1933-7418, doi-access=free

References

New media art Generative artificial intelligence Generative literature Poetry movements