DDA500 Readings

Primary or author/publisher sources are preferred where available.

Alan Turing — Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Turing’s 1950 paper introducing the imitation game and asking whether machines can think.

• Primary/archive source: Turing Digital Archive
• Published in Mind 59(236), 1950.

Vernor Vinge — The Coming Technological Singularity

Vinge’s 1993 NASA VISION-21 paper on the prospect and consequences of greater-than-human machine intelligence.

• Primary source: NASA Technical Reports Server
• NASA PDF

Ashish Vaswani et al. — Attention Is All You Need

The 2017 paper introducing the Transformer architecture.

• Author manuscript: arXiv:1706.03762

Chris Olah, Alexander Mordvintsev, and Ludwig Schubert — Feature Visualization

Interactive article on visualizing what neural networks learn and represent.

• Primary publication: Distill

Joanna Zylinska — AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams

A critical account of AI art, creativity, labor, aesthetics, and the politics surrounding machine vision.

• Publisher page: Open Humanities Press
• Authorized open-access PDF

James Bridle — Ways of Being

A book about intelligence across animals, plants, machines, and ecological systems.

• Publisher/title information: Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.

Ethan Mollick — Co-Intelligence

A practical account of working and thinking with contemporary generative AI systems.

• Publisher page: Penguin Random House

Ted Chiang — Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art

Chiang argues that artistic practice depends on sustained intentional choice rather than merely generating an output from a compressed instruction.

• Primary publication: The New Yorker

Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor — AI Snake Oil

A critical guide to distinguishing useful AI systems from exaggerated or unsupported claims.

• Authors’ site: AI Snake Oil
• Book background: Introducing the AI Snake Oil book project

Ken Liu — Art in the Age of AI

Conversation on AI, authorship, art, and creative practice used in Week 2.

• Manifold One: Ken Liu — Art in the Age of AI