The CEAH hosted the annual Benson Memorial Lecture on April 9, 2026, with Dr. Dennis Tenen as the speaker. The lecture was attended by ISU faculty and students from various departments across the fields of Arts, Humanities, and Design.
Dr. Tenen's talk on Artifice & Intelligence: Collective Authorship
The talk anchored recent advances in machine intelligence within the broader history of collective labor. Rather tha
n treating generative AI as a break with humanistic traditions, Dr. Tenen argued that it emerges from the rationalization and coordination of creative work across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on writers' manuals, plot compendia, and early efforts to formalize narrative production, the talk showed how fiction in particular became organized as a cooperative enterprise rather than the expression of individual genius. Brief case studies from the history of serial fiction and machine translation were shown to illustrate the development of collective authorship in practice.
Many of the ideas in the talk was inspired by Dr. Tenen's acclaimed book Literary Theory for Robots which "reveals the hidden history of modern machine intelligence, taking readers on a spellbinding journey from medieval Arabic philosophy to visions of a universal language, past Hollywood fiction factories and missile defense systems trained on Russian folktales."
Click here to see the full lecture.
Workshop: Beyond the Prompt: Writing with AI
Besides the lecture, CEAH also arranged for a workshop on April 10 with Dr. Tenen, where participants ca
me together to examine practical strategies for improving the quality of AI-assisted writing in interdisciplinary contexts from across the Humanities, Art, and Design. Rather than treating artificial intelligence as a substitute for human creativity, writers in the workshop approached it as a tool that requires direction, judgment, and revision. They experimented with concrete prompting and editing techniques while considering how to maintain authorship when working with generative systems. The goal was not automation, but augmentation: to write more deliberately, more responsibly, and at a higher standard.
About Dr. Tenen
Dennis Yi Tenen is an associate professor of English at Columbia University, where he also co-directs the Narrative Intelligence Lab. His published work can be found in monographs including Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (Stanford University Press, 2017), Literary Theory for Robots (W.W. Norton, 2024) and Author Function under contract with Chicago UP. His recent articles appear on the pages of Modern Philology, New Literary History, Amodern, boundary2, Computational Culture, and Modernism/modernity on topics that span literary theory, the sociology of literature, media history, and computational narratology. A long-time affiliate of Columbia’s Data Science Institute, formerly a Microsoft engineer in the Windows group and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, his code runs on personal computers worldwide.