Isabelle Levent

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,

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

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,

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.

New art-making technologies change art in consistent ways, and studying the past helps us understand how things will change in the future.

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

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,

This is posing questions to writers everywhere: Which parts of writing are so tedious you’d be happy to see them go? Which parts bring you the inexplicable joy of creating something from nothing? And what is it about writing you hold most dear?