Isabelle Levent

A poem, I would say, is the site where “hollow and void” poetry is tactically deployed in a physical and social context, in order to achieve a particular effect. The poem unites poetry with an intention. So yes, a language model can indeed (and can only) write poetry, but only a person can write a poem.

My lesson from these two examples is that it might be possible to make prompting “invisible” by making it part of the UI, and finetuning output for as much of the writer’s context as possible to make it more useful. Latency matters, and cost matters, which are wonderful because these tend to be “regular engineering” type problems rather than AI

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. 

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.

As part of this model where the ‘back-end’ gets more attention than the artefact, a systematic dismantling of the myth of ‘the artist’ as a stand-alone genius, standing above, or aside from the world, needs to be enacted.