[Google AI Overview at the query, signed out and incognito (operator defaults of 2026-10-01 and 2026-10-14). The paste is the Overview expanded (the 'AI Mode Conversation' view).] The 'You said' line carries the query twice, run together, and is given once here. Inline links are Google redirect URLs, kept as pasted. [QUERENT] The Literary History of Artificial Intelligence [SYSTEM] View all The literary history of artificial intelligence spans thousands of years of human storytelling, stretching from ancient mythological automata to modern algorithmic text generation. Ancient and Mythological Roots (3,000 BCE – 19th Century) • Classical Automata: Stories of artificial beings and mechanical servants appear in early epics, such as Homer’s Iliad (describing golden handmaidens forged by Hephaestus) and Apollonius Rhodius’s Argonautica (featuring Talos, a bronze giant protecting Crete). • Proto-Computing and Fiction: In the 19th century, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) explored the ethical and emotional consequences of creating life or intelligence, while Ada Lovelace envisioned analytical engines capable of musical and symbolic composition beyond mere number crunching. • The Word "Robot": Czech playwright Karel Čapek introduced the term "robot" in his 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), depicting artificial workers that eventually rebel against humanity. Early 20th-Century Writing Machines and Manuals (c. 1890–1970) • Combinatorial Plot Devices: Long before neural networks, writers and inventors experimented with systematic and algorithmic approaches to storytelling. For example, French author Georges Polti published The 36 Dramatic Situations (1895), arguing that all plots could be mapped and recombined. • Industrialized Writing: The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw writing manuals, creative writing formulas, and mechanical plot-generator games (such as Robo the Game That Writes a Million Story Plots) designed to automate or systematize narrative creation. • Exhibitions and Archives: Collaborative research projects, such as the Columbia University Literary AI Exhibition, explore how early writing techniques and manuals laid the groundwork for machine-generated prose and poetry. The Birth of Formal AI and Science Fiction (1950s–Present) • The 1956 Dartmouth Workshop: John McCarthy and his colleagues formally coined the term "artificial intelligence," proposing that every aspect of learning or intelligence could be simulated by a machine—an idea that heavily mirrored literary and philosophical explorations of the possible. • Utopian and Dystopian Visions: Science fiction literature repeatedly split AI into dual trajectories: helpful companions (like Star Trek's Data or Star Wars's R2-D2) versus existential threats. • From Symbolic Logic to Deep Learning: Modern large language models trace their lineage back through decades of debate between rule-based symbolic AI and connectionist neural networks, arriving at contemporary transformer-based text generation. Would you like to explore a specific era (such as 19th-century gothic fiction or mid-century cybernetics) or focus on how modern LLMs relate to early plot generators? University of Cambridge