Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen (dennistenen.com)

Dennis Yi Tenen’s Literary Theory for Robots is a short, witty history that traces text‑generating technologies from premodern combinatorial devices to today’s language models, arguing that what we call “AI” is one node in a long lineage of tools that automate composition and cognition. Through lively episodes—most notably Athanasius Kircher’s “Mathematical Organ,” a wooden box of labeled slates whose combinable letter-strings and accompanying “applications” manuals could produce music, poetry, ciphers and calendar calculations—Tenen shows how mechanical systems have long outsourced creative procedure to accessible interfaces. The book’s compact 141 pages blend scholarship and humor to make the case that these tools routinely migrate from the extraordinary to mundane, reshaping how people think and learn. Technically relevant to AI/ML readers, Tenen’s account reframes modern language models as sophisticated heirs to rule‑based, combinatorial generators: slates ≈ tokens, manuals ≈ prompting or system instructions, and the organ’s combinatorics ≈ algorithmic composition. The historical quarrel—Kircher’s democratizing pedagogy versus Quirinus Kuhlmann’s insistence on arduous inward learning—echoes contemporary tensions about LLMs “parroting” versus true understanding, interpretability, and education. The central implication is ethical and design‑oriented: AI systems are tools embedded in social practices, so developers and researchers must attend to interface, pedagogy, and responsibility as much as capability.