Isabelle Levent

Our intuitive moral understanding of actors and transgressions may be at odds with the inherent complexity of AI systems.

If I have an idea for a novel, but the computer writes most of it, is it still my story? This question will not be answered with numbers about how many words I or the computer wrote. It’s going to be answered culturally; it’s going to be a feeling we have about where authenticity or truth really lies.

Creativity is the ability to come up with ideas or artefacts that are  new ,  surprising , and  valuable . 

Strict synonymy, or even a drop-in replacement word, is not essential for most writers, who instead may use a thesaurus to expand an idea or discover a new one. 

Instead, I’d like us to ask: in whose voice do our machines write? What voices do they obfuscate? Where do their words come from? In short, I’d like us to ask questions about power, and the ways in which it functions through and around language.