Isabelle Levent

OpenAI, which has been accused by its peers of releasing tools to the public with reckless speed, is particularly good at designing interfaces for its models that feel like magic. “It’s a conscious design imperative to produce these moments of shock and awe,” Crawford says. “We’re going to keep having those moments of enchantment.”

A couple participants found success using the chatbot as a convenient search engine alternative (KL, WT). KL wrote: “It’s kind of great to use the chat interface and treat LaMDA as a thesaurus, quote finder, and general research assistant.”

The Lab’s primary focus is on the ways in which artists and designers are adopting, adapting and remaking AI processes, building their own datasets and reaching into the ‘grey box’ of AI technologies. 

This is posing questions to writers everywhere: Which parts of writing are so tedious you’d be happy to see them go? Which parts bring you the inexplicable joy of creating something from nothing? And what is it about writing you hold most dear? 

Many people don't consider that when they use the internet, be that making a simple HTML/CSS site, or using a site through a big conglomerate, scrapers are scraping and crawlers are crawling the content unless you've specifically configured  robots.txt  and  no-index  rules to prevent it.

Academically, this is a collision of everything from computer science and art history to media studies to disruptive innovation to labor economics, and no one of these disciplines seems sufficient to cover the topic. 

Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations,

Crawford elaborated in an interview. “When you have this enchanted determinism, you say, we can’t possibly understand this. And we can’t possibly regulate it when it’s clearly so unknown and such a black box,” she says. “And that’s a trap.”