Scott sits down with Aarhus University researcher Malthe Stavning Erslev to explore the aesthetics of generative AI, electronic literature, and "bot mimicry." They discuss how humans imitate algorithms, trace the evolution of neural networks from RNNs to BERT and GPT models, and examine how creative interactions can push back against the homogenization of modern language models. 

References

Devlin, J., Chang, M. W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2018). BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding. https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805

Erslev, M. S. (2023). Bot Mimicry & Literary AI: On the Aesthetics of Human-Algorithmic Interactions. https://darc.au.dk/blog/nyhed/artikel/new-book-bot-mimicry-in-digital-literary-culture

McCarthy, J., Minsky, M. L., Rochester, N., & Shannon, C. E. (1955). A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/dartmouth/dartmouth.pdf

Patti, K. (2018). I forced a bot to watch over 1000 hours of Olive Garden commercials and then asked it to write an Olive Garden commercial of its own. https://x.com/KeatonPatti/status/1006961202998726665?lang=en 

Pold, S. B., Veel, K., Erslev, M. S., & Ørum, K. (2025–2028). Human-AI Collaboration: Imaginaries, Interventions, Interfaces (HAIC-III) https://darc.au.dk/projects/human-ai-collaboration-haic-iii

Reddit Community. (2015–present). r/TotallyNotRobots: A Subreddit for Totally Normal Human Encounters. https://www.reddit.com/r/totallynotrobots/

Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, Ł., & Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention Is All You Need. https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762