Isabelle Levent

The “story seeds” control allowed writers to experiment with using Wordcraft to generate ideas at the very beginning of the writing process. MT described the “story seeds” control as giving her “a place on my computer to go that looked like a blank page but did not behave as such.” E

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,

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? 

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

The Lab’s primary focus is on the ways in which artists and designers are adopting, adapting and remaking AI processes, building their own datasets and reaching into the ‘grey box’ of AI technologies. 

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.”

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.”

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.