Kehlmann in CTRL: A Conversation among Daniel Kehlmann, Bryan McCann, and Clara Blume

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On Wednesday, April 21, 2021, Open Austria Art + Tech Lab and Deutsches Haus at NYU presented a conversation between renowned author Daniel Kehlmann and philosopher and AI researcher Bryan McCann, who discussed collaborating on “AI Storytelling,” an innovative project in which they jointly explored and experimented with the process of creating new stories by working with an NLP-based (natural language processing) algorithm named CTRL. Kehlmann reflected on this creative collaboration between art and technology and on the challenges of human and artificial creativity in his widely acclaimed new essay “Mein Algorithmus und ich” [My Algorithm and Me], from which he read in the essay’s congenial English translation by Ross Benjamin during the event. The conversation between Kehlmann and McCann was moderated by Clara Blume (head of Open Austria’s Art and Tech Lab) and included a live demonstration of Kehlmann’s collaboration with CTRL, providing insight into which formats proved more successful than others.

About the “AI Storytelling” project:
Storytelling connects us with each other and our world. We channel ourselves through language in ways that span temporal and spatial divides, and our use of language creates a trove of meaning waiting to be examined. This project, initiated by the Open Austria Art + Tech Lab in Feb 2020, brought together two storytellers: Daniel Kehlmann, renowned German-language novelist and playwright, and Bryan McCann, a philosopher and scientist of natural language. Together, they explored the role that artificial intelligence tools called language models might play in storytelling. Language models are trained to predict which words are most likely to occur given a prompt from the user -- the words, to borrow Calvino's phrase, likely to "give birth to one another." McCann had designed a new language model called CTRL to give users more control over the AI text generation process. Working together, Kehlmann and McCann explored a novel mode of storytelling that integrates AI as a collaborator. While CTRL generated suggestions based on internalized statistical patterns of language use, Kehlmann deftly wove those suggestions together, at times cutting them, diverting them, or subverting them, in order to "test the extent to which words could fit with one another." By offering a mechanism to defamiliarize well-worn patterns of language, this story of “AI Storytelling” produced moments of surprise, laughter, disappointment, and inspiration. In doing so, it contributes to a broader narrative of how AI might be used as a tool of self-reflection, allowing us to investigate our language, our stories, our histories, and ourselves.
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