Isabelle Levent

A poem, I would say, is the site where “hollow and void” poetry is tactically deployed in a physical and social context, in order to achieve a particular effect. The poem unites poetry with an intention. So yes, a language model can indeed (and can only) write poetry, but only a person can write a poem.

Allen feels the same way. “I believe if you focus on the negative with AI, then that will come true,” he says. “And if we get more people focusing on the good and positivity that we can do with it, then that will come true.”

They will shade our constant submissions to the vast digital commons, intentional or consensual or mandatory, with the knowledge that every selfie or fragment of text is destined to become a piece of general-purpose training data for the attempted automation of everything. They will be used on people in extremely creative ways, with and without

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.”

New art-making technologies change art in consistent ways, and studying the past helps us understand how things will change in the future.

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.”

Much of the discussion this year is about text-to-image, but I believe this is a temporary stage; these things are going to continue evolving very quickly.