Isabelle Levent

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. 

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. 

Because creativity  by definition  involves not only novelty but value, and because values are highly variable, it follows that many arguments about creativity are rooted in disagreements about value. 

As part of this model where the ‘back-end’ gets more attention than the artefact, a systematic dismantling of the myth of ‘the artist’ as a stand-alone genius, standing above, or aside from the world, needs to be enacted.