Isabelle Levent

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

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.”

Whatever the size of the space, someone who comes up with a new idea within that thinking-style is being creative in the second, exploratory, sense. If the new idea is surprising not just in itself but as an example of an unexpected general  type , so much the better.

There are a couple reasons why Wordcraft may have struggled with style and voice... Another reason could have been limitations of the underlying model. LaMDA and other similar language models are trained to be most confident on the kind of text they see most often–typically internet data. However, professional creative writers are usually writing

Even when these paragraphs fail, they make her interested in the story again. She’s curious about this computer-generated text, and it reignites her interest in her own writing.

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. 

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. 

Maybe the creative work is now to figure out ways to nudge AIs into being weird and interesting rather than producing inane imitations of the most ordinary human writing

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.