Episode 2131: Laurent Dubreuil’s creative answer to whether AI can think creatively

Trust a French literary theorist to think creatively about whether AI can think creatively. Laurent Dubreuil is a professor of French literature at Cornell and the author of the intriguing Harper’s piece, Metal Machine Music, which asks both if AI and we humans can think creatively. Using ChatGPT, Dubreuil ran a test at Cornell asking a bot and humans to compete poems written in English and then invited people to guess which were authored by AI and which by humans. The results of this creative literary experiment were surprising, particularly in terms of the common assumption that we humans are more creative than machines.

Laurent Dubreuil is Professor of French, Francophone and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. In his research, Laurent Dubreuil aims to explore the powers of literary and artistic thinking at the interface of social thought, the humanities and the sciences. Dubreuil's scholarship is broadly comparative and makes use of his reading knowledge in some ten languages. Professor Dubreuil is the founding director of the Cornell Humanities Lab, a place for reflexive dialogues between practitioners from the sciences and the discursive disciplines who wish to eschew reductionism. At the École normale supérieure, Paris, and in other French universities, Prof. Dubreuil received training in most fields pertaining to the humanities, with a particular emphasis on French, Francophone and Comparative Literature (doctorate: 2001), Philosophy (doctorate: 2002), and Classical Philology. His professors and advisors included Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Umberto Eco and Pierre Judet de La Combe. In his years as a Mellon New Directions Fellow, Dubreuil acquired further competencies in Cognitive Science. Dubreuil is the author of thirteen books. Among his scholarly essays, five are available in English, most recently Poetry and Mind (Fordham UP: 2018) and Dialogues on the Human Ape (U of Minnesota P: 2019: co-authored with primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh). Five other volumes have been released in French, including (in 2019) Baudelaire au gouffre de la modernité (Hermann), La dictature des identités (Gallimard). Dr. Dubreuil also authored three “creative” literary essays in French. In 2016, Anthony Mangeon edited L’empire de la littérature, an anthology of previously unreleased texts on and by Dubreuil.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

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