Isabelle Levent

The fact that adding keywords like  Let’s Think Step By Step , adding “Greg Rutkowski”, prompt weights, and even negative prompting are still so enormously effective, is a sign that we are nowhere close to perfecting the “language” part of “large language models”.

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

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. 

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

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. 

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