Narrative Intelligence

Description

In this talk, Dennis Yi Tenen will draw on his recent book Literary Theory for Robots (2024) to offer a broad view of the shared pasts of literature and computer science, ranging from medieval Arabic philosophy to Hollywood fiction factories, to missile defense systems trained on Russian folktales. Then, he will present new work that puts large language models into conversation with one another—literally—to study their techniques of persuasion.

Dennis Yi Tenen is an Associate Professor of English at Columbia University. His research happens in the fields of literary history, media theory, computational humanities, sociology of literature, narratology, and history of science and technology.

Event Details

• Date: Tuesday, September 23, 2025 @ 4:30–6:00PM ET
• Location: Seminar Room, Dana Palmer House (16 Quincy St.)
• Registration: forms.gle/QcEzyDJRpkiQgXtX9

Forms of Intelligence Series

This talk is part of Forms of Intelligence, a 5-part lecture series that demonstrates the rich possibilities of pursuing interdisciplinary work between the arts, humanities, and computer science.

The series highlights the importance of humanistic expertise in the development of foundation models or “generative AI,” particularly to efforts that make such models inclusive (multilingual, culturally appropriate, representative, etc.). Engineers developing GPTs for text and image generation deeply need expertise in languages and translation, aesthetics and the interpretation of images, as well as histories and cultures of archives, museums, and other knowledge-making institutions, in order to develop high quality datasets, tokenization procedures, and evaluation benchmarks. There is a committed, growing body of computer science academics and industry researchers who recognize this, but there are many obstacles to bringing humanists and engineers into conversation.

The series is designed to cohere community among students and faculty interested in pursuing research questions and creative projects in this area. The talks and response sessions are designed around key concepts that are central to both the humanities and to AI research, but that our communities may use in different ways.

Through the invited talks and formal response, the event aims produce a dialogue that crosses the “two cultures” or our disciplines–highlighting how these shared concepts might serve as “boundary objects” to facilitate further conversation and collaboration. By creating space for engagement around these key concepts, the events will prototype ways of bringing humanistic expertise to bear and intervene in the development of technical systems.