Isabelle Levent

It becomes a question of who created a certain work of art.

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”.

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.”

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. 

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. 

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.