Isabelle Levent

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.”

Now none of this is meant to say that I think programmers, artists and engineers have no responsibilities when it comes to the outputs of machine learning models. In fact, I think we bear responsibility for everything these models do. (I never, for example, attribute authorship to a program or a model. If I publish the results of a text generator,

For a computer to make a subtle combinational joke, never mind to assess its tastefulness, would require, first, a data-base with a richness comparable to ours, and, second, methods of link-making (and link-evaluating) comparable in subtlety with ours. 

Imagine an art-lover at an exhibition entitled ‘Dots 2008’. He speaks to two artists, each displaying a painting. In both cases, the art-lover cannot see past the seemingly random arrangement of dots of paint. He mentions this to the first artist, who says: “Oh, no, they’re not randomly placed. Each dot represents a friend of mine. The colour of