Isabelle Levent

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.”

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

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

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. 

Many methods for creating these models don't (and to be honest can't) attach the name, website and other details of every image and piece of text used to a create a new image in the metadata to every step of the process.

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.”