Isabelle Levent

In particular, anthropomorphizing the AI system mitigates the responsibility to the artist, while bolstering the responsibility of the technologist. Critically, this suggests that the responsibility that will be allocated to individuals in the creation of AI art will be dependent on the choice of language and framing used to discuss it

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.”

However, we often found that it was the unexpected differences between the prompt and the generated image’s interpretation of it that yielded new insight for and excitement from participants.

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.”

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. 

Indeed, AI is a diffuse term that corresponds to a web of human actors and computational processes interacting in complex ways