Isabelle Levent

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,

User-generated content platforms were a huge source for the image data. WordPress-hosted blogs on wp.com and wordpress.com represented 819k images together, or 6.8% of all images. Other photo, art, and blogging sites included 232k images from Smugmug, 146k from Blogspot, 121k images were from Flickr, 67k images from DeviantArt, 74k from Wikimedia,

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.

Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations,

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.”

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. 

There’s another edge case as well; in theory, with the same prompts and the random seed that’s used for generating the images, you could end up with someone else generating the same, or a very similar, image as what you created. 

“Our business has never been about the ease of creating imagery or the resulting volume. It is about connecting and cutting through.”