UC Santa Cruz

Most discussions of procedural content generation have focused primarily on the artifacts that generators produce or the process by which these artifacts are created. Less focus, however, has been placed on the methods by which generators interpret their input. Many generators take complex input, act as part of a generative pipeline, are part of a mixed-initiative communication with the user, or otherwise need to take context into account during generation. In these cases, the process by which the generator reads and makes sense of its input is often just as interesting as the process by which it produces an output artifact. It is worthwhile to take a closer look at how generators read. Via a case study of two erasure poetry generators, we propose the concept of a generativist reading: a process of reading that produces generative models. Many existing generators have dual input/output or reading/writing processes that are presented as a monolithic unit, but our understanding of both processes and results is enriched when we clearly distinguish between how generators write and how they read.