Rubrique Technologie / Tech Section

Rubrique Technologie / Tech Section (RT/TS for short) is an investigation into the nature of faits divers as a genre of writing, in a nod to the “Novels in Three Lines” written by Felix Fénéon and published in 1906 in the French newspaper le Matin.

“RT/TS” is based on a text generator that produces French and English news items that imagine some of the ways technology will impact us in the near future. Most of the generated news involves people getting struck by autonomous vehicles or even aircraft. Others describe labor disputes, hostile takeover attempts, inventions, and the termination of online services. While many of the texts are stamped out using an almost trivial method, a significant minority of them are generated using a large language model (LLM), leading to outcomes that are sometimes more amusing, but that do not obey the norms of news writing, often are not even narrative, and sometimes can be much less coherent. What is imagined in RT/TS is not apocalyptic or discontinuous but actually features many of the same problems we face today; the methods of producing the texts are today’s as well.