TECHNOLOGY

Are Stendhal and Shakespeare ready for the world of AI? Mike Gioia says “yes”!

Home » Uncategorized » Are Stendhal and Shakespeare ready for the world of AI? Mike Gioia says “yes”! « Robert Harrison to explore “critical frontiers” in Cambridge’s Clark Lectures, May 9-18 Bringing Stendhal to the 21st century Mike Gioia has worked in big budget film production on superhero shows. He’s also created a poetry film studio which mostly involved driving around to poet’s homes and filming them. Moreover, he’s been a tech entrepreneur in the generative AI space and founded Pickaxe . Name sound familiar? It should. He is the son poet Dana Gioia , former National Endowment for the Arts chair and former California poet laureate. I’ve written about him countless times on the Book Haven, for example here and here and here . Type in the search box for more. Mike and I have something important in common: both of us share a love of literature and the humanities. Moreover, we’ve both received Emergent Ventures grants from the Mercatus Center, the creation of Tyler Cowen . Mike is one of the most recently honored by the grant program. “ I’m a big advocate of video as a mass education tool and way to reach a broader audience,” he says. “I pushed my to dad to film and publish all the poetry videos on his YouTube channel .” (You can watch them here .) “I’m focused on making super powerful tools like Large Language Models accessible to ordinary people through good, simple design and practical applications.” From Mike: I’ll win Book Haven readers’ trust with an uncontroversial opinion: reading Shakespeare is enjoyable and worthwhile. And now I’ll lose you entirely: we should read Shakespeare with AI. On set of a comedy pilot, watching the director’s monitor. Recently, I’ve been reading with the assistance of Large Language Models (abbreviated to LLMs). These are AIs that can process and generate text. When I use LLMs to read, I’m still reading. But AI is on the sideline to contextualize anything I want, transform paragraphs into new shapes, or even offer an opinion. LLMs are models trained on the entirety of humanity’s […]