Allison Parrish

By Allison Parrish I set out a while ago to make a Game Boy cartridge from scratch. This is not a novel goal; bootleg Game Boy cartridges have existed almost as long as the Game Boy itself has, and there are many third-party cartridges now available for purchase, or that have copyleft designs. But I wanted to know how Game Boy cartridges work. I was also excited to use the PIO functionality of the RP2040 microcontroller.

This is the text of a lecture I delivered at Iona University’s Data Science Symposium in April, 2023. The text has been lightly edited for clarity and consistency, and I omitted from this text a portion of the talk as delivered that concerned my own work. Hello everyone. My name is Allison Parrish. I’m a poet and computer programmer and an Assistant Arts Professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program/Interactive Media Arts program.

This is a revised and condensed version of “(Notes toward a theory of) Language models and poetics,” delivered as the Vector Institute ARTificial Intelligence Distinguished Lecture in August 2020. In 2019, Gwern Branwen—a well-known machine learning researcher—posted the results of several experiments in fine-tuning a large pre-trained language model on a corpus of poetry. The language model in question was OpenAI’s GPT-2.