“Your methods of compiling are pretty inefficient,” said the student, who had been sitting quietly in the back of the college classroom, to the guest lecturer, during question time.

Xtine Burrough, an associate professor in the School of Arts, Technology and Emerging Communication at the University of Texas, Dallas, took no offense at the young woman’s comment on her working habits. In fact, afterward while visiting with me and some fellow professors, she got a good laugh out of it — hoist with her own petard. Because why come and talk to a group of Caltech students — ipso facto some of the brightest young scientists and engineers in the world — if you’re not prepared for a little give and take on human efficiency?

Burrough was joined by Nick Montfort, a computational poet and professor of digital media at MIT, in a class taught by poet Eran Hadas, Schusterman Visiting Israeli Artist at the Pasadena campus. Hadas is the creator of Augmented Poetry, an innovative poetry-writing algorithm for computers, and the night before the trio had led a Caltech symposium on computational literature.

If letting a computer write our poems might seem a “1984”-ish blight on the memory of Percy Shelley and other quill-penned tortured souls, the fact is that, as with all things computational, computers merely do what we tell them to do. Garbage in, garbage out. And the process of composition has always been a bit mysterious.

Where does great literature come from? Writers from the famously often-drunk Li Bai in the 8th century to our time’s William Burroughs, who took scissors to his sentences and rearranged them, have sought ways to give their words a mysterioso kick in the pants. Why not write some code and see what comes out?

The comment on inefficiency came after Burroughs had described a decidedly low-tech conceptual art project she once embarked on. She took a pocket dictionary and began to read through it, using Wite-Out to delete any word she didn’t already know to create a personal dictionary. But she has since gone online in her methods of making art with words, including hiring workers from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk by paying them to take a break from their physical labor for five minutes and then write about the experience. “I closed my eyes and began to think,” wrote one.

At home in Tel Aviv, Hadas hosts a radio show and teaches university classes about “enabling humans to manipulate the material of language” through technology. He even co-created a headset that generates poems from EEG brain waves.

He realizes that the criticism from the unitiated will always go to supposedly dehumanizing aspects. One review blurb printed on the back cover of a book by Montfort, the MIT prof, even calls him “famous … for delegating his creativity to algorithms.” And during the seminar, he said, “I’m not interested in self-expression.”

Of course that’s not literally true. He’s making an observation about the act of writing during a time when — a new one for me — most of the reading on this Earth is done by machines. Hadas says he’s excited about teaching at a school like Caltech because “most of my students are scientists; they’re not going to be poets in the future. But this can be an entry point for someone who views the humanities as a chore to get into them.”

Truth is that scientists are always better at understanding the humanities than poets are at physics. I once sat in on a friend’s personal journaling class at Caltech, and she said these were the best college writers she’d ever taught. Come semester’s end, I look forward to reading what Hadas’s students’ computers have spit out.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.