dinkolas-parrish

Parrish's presentation Exploring (Semantic) Space With (Literal) Robots brought up several interesting ideas surrounding the ethics of creating generative text utilizing corpora from other people, and of finding unexplored literary spaces. It reminds me of the question of whether math is invented or discovered. Are sentences invented or discovered? Surely once a language exists (whether invented or discovered), a simple algorithm could generate every possible combination of words (like the Library of Babel). This might imply that once a language exists, all one can do is discover (not invent) sentences because they were already implicitly invented. I think this is the crux of one of Parrish's ethical concerns about generative poetry from a given body of text. This is made more complicated by her project that generates entirely new words. Sure, they're new words, but they are constructed from old letters and letter patterns. I don't have answers to these problems (not to mention that Parrish brought up other concerns about generated texts' meanings/content, not just their origin) but they're interesting and important to think about.