This article proposes the notion of the ‘Lovelace Effect’ as an analytical tool to identify situations in which the behaviour of computing systems is perceived by users as original and creative. It contrasts the Lovelace Effect with the more commonly known ‘Lovelace objection’, which claims that computers cannot originate or create anything, but only do what their programmers instruct them to do. By analysing the case study of AICAN – an AI art-generating system – we argue for the need for approaches in computational creativity to shift focus from what computers are able to do in ontological terms to the perceptions of human users who enter into interactions with them. The case study illuminates how the Lovelace effect can be facilitated through technical but also through representational means, such as the situations and cultural contexts in which users are invited to interact with the AI.

In 2021, the San Francisco Chronicle released a feature article about a man who chose to resurrect his deceased fiancée by training a chatbot system built on OpenAI’s GPT language models on her old digital messages. He then had emotional conversations with this chatbot, which appeared to accurately mimic the deceased’s writing style. This case study raises questions about the communicative influences of thanabots: chatbots trained on data of the dead. While thanabots are clearly not living conversational partners, the rhetoric, everyday experiences, and emotions associated with these system have very real implications for living users. This paper applies a lifeworld perspective to consider the hermeneutics of thanabots. It shows that thanabots exist in a long lineage of efforts to communicate with the dead, but acknowledges that thanatechnologies must be more thoroughly studied for better understanding of what it means to die in a digital age.

As cultural circumstances become increasingly digital, the importance of theoretical frameworks guiding calculated considerations of authorial intention and reader response is being reaffirmed.The framework proposed in this article is that of hermeneutics: the study of understanding, of processes of meaning-making. Although explicit application of hermeneutics has fallen out of fashion, the field is especially valuable for critically approaching digital texts. This article thus serves as a re-introduction to hermeneutics, particularly for digital textual study. It offers an overview of historical hermeneutical views, and then applies a hermeneutics perspective to a new kind of text made possible by digital technologies: computer-generated prose. Through analysis and repurposing of OpenAI's GPT-2 software, this paper argues that the reintegration of hermeneutics in digital textual studies may contribute to more comprehensive understandings of both human and computer intention, especially in instances of computer-generated texts.Digital technologies are changing conventional understandings of authorship and reader responsibility; hermeneutics helps us understand what these changes are, how they have come to be, and why they matter.

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