Algo-Lit: What Was It? A Look at the Generative, Multimodal, and Interconnected Possibilities of its First Four Decades

This book was conceived and compiled by the UCLA Algo-Lit Collective in the first week of the fall quarter of 2023, with editing and design by Danny Snelson. It is titled in homage to foundational essays on electronic literature and digital poetics by N. Katherine Hayles and Christopher Funkhouser, respectively. Cover generated in Illusion Diffusion and Dall-E 3. All text was generated by ChatGPT, given the prompts of 33 students responding to the course assignment: **Produce a collaborative work of speculative algo-lit scholarship.** Imagine you are a literary historian writing an academic book in the year 2063, looking back on the last four decades of AI-generated literature. Prompt ChatGPT to produce a coherent study of the politics, ethics, movements, outliers, and significance of 40 years of algorithmic literature. These outputs were then arranged and compiled collectively over the following week. CC0 | UCLA | Algo-Lit | 2063