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Anticipating the rise in Artificial Intelligence’s ability to produce original works of literature, this study suggests that literariness, or that which constitutes a text as literary, is understudied in relation to text generation. From a computational perspective, literature is particularly challenging because it typically employs figurative and ambiguous language. Literary expertise would be beneficial to understanding how meaning and emotion are conveyed in this art form but is often overlooked. We propose placing experts from two dissimilar disciplines – machine learning and literary studies – in conversation to improve the quality of AI writing. Concentrating on evaluation as a vital stage in the text generation process, the study demonstrates that benefit could be derived from literary theoretical perspectives. This knowledge would improve algorithm design and enable a deeper understanding of how AI learns and generates. This article appears in the special track on AI and Society.

The use of artificial intelligence in the legal sector flourished in recent years. This development is often met with excitement and unease. In this critical reflection, we analyse how artificial intelligence functions in modern legal technologies, and what its future implications are for the legal sector and critical legal thinking. We firstly discuss how machine learning and ‘Narrow AI’ are pertinent in this discussion, and how misleading the ‘hype’ on robot lawyers is. We then show how legal technologies are currently utilized, and the potential ways to map the modern legal technology landscape. Finally, we examine the potential effects of AI and legal technologies on legal decision-making, as complex algorithms open up the potential to disarrange or obscure critical analysis.

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This paper proposes a generative language model called AfriKI. Our approach is based on an LSTM architecture trained on a small corpus of contemporary fiction. With the aim of promoting human creativity, we use the model as an authoring tool to explore machine-inthe-loop Afrikaans poetry generation. To our knowledge, this is the first study to attempt creative text generation in Afrikaans.