Isabelle Levent

They thought it would be particularly useful for writing in a certain voice or character, or for coming up with thematically exciting words. They wondered what kind of thesaurus would come from a corpus of nautical novels (like Moby Dick)

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.

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,

The “story seeds” control allowed writers to experiment with using Wordcraft to generate ideas at the very beginning of the writing process. MT described the “story seeds” control as giving her “a place on my computer to go that looked like a blank page but did not behave as such.” E

What’s difficult is to state our aesthetic values clearly enough to enable the program itself to make the evaluation at each generation.

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.

Strict synonymy, or even a drop-in replacement word, is not essential for most writers, who instead may use a thesaurus to expand an idea or discover a new one. 

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.”