Critical AI Theory Lunch discussing Heuser's “Generative Aesthetics”
Read the paper in advance, bring your own lunch, and join us to discuss a recent theoretical paper about AI.
In our second reading group meeting we will discuss:
Heuser, Ryan. 2025. “Generative Aesthetics: On Formal Stuckness in AI Verse.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 10 (3): 1036. https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.144825 (external link)
ABSTRACT: This paper examines the formal and aesthetic patterns of AI-generated poems through a series of computational experiments. Through analyses of rhyme and rhythm, it reveals how large language models (LLMs) exhibit a stubborn, formal stuckness in their outputs. The paper demonstrates that LLMs often ossify poetic forms by producing formally conservative texts that adhere more rigidly to traditional poetic conventions than even the most formally strict periods of literary history. The paper interprets these findings as evidence of a computational logic of idealization that privileges the satisfaction of formal expectation over its artful frustration, regularity over variation, and conformity over contradiction. It proposes “generative formalism” as a critical framework that extends traditional as well as quantitative and formalist methods to understand how generative systems process, flatten, and reify cultural production.