On November 2, my German language novel (Berlin, Miami) – written in cooperation with a self-trained large language model – was published by Rohstoff Verlag. I reported on the making-of in July in Tagesspiegel (German).
From the publisher’s description:
“The world in Hannes Bajohr’s (Berlin, Miami) is all that is the case for an AI fed with four contemporary novels: a nameless programmer who checks lists to see who is dead and who is not; agents of the Ãää, who want to stir up Ãäänxieties; the newly-founded low congress on Sylt; Kieferling and Teichenkopf; life viruses and co-yoga, pitch words, the six-lame language, and THE DIFFERENCE. What is generated from this setup is narration as a mere surface phenomenon, the mad fever dream of a language model that simulates love stories and conspiracy narration in defiance of the logic of reality and grammar, just to fall down the rabbit hole of its own words; it hits walls and loses the last causal parenthesis. But instead of finally waking up, Bajohr’s AI is spurred on and on until even the robots’ old dream of electric sheep has to burst, thus giving literature entirely new boundaries.”
Reviews in German-language media: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Swiss Radio, Kurier (Austria), Deutschlandfunk (writeup), Deutschlandradio Kultur (writeup), NDR, Cicero, literaturkritik.de, Bajour, nau.ch, and Goethe Institute.
I talk about the book in interviews with CCB Magazin, De Gruyter Podcast, Erklär mir die Welt podcast, and the magazine human (not online, first issue 2023).
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