Isabelle Levent
@isabellelevent
Isabelle Levent
@isabellelevent
A recurring theme in participant feedback was that the language model lacked taste and intentionality...In contrast, good writers are skilled not only in producing but also discerning good language. In other words, they have taste, the ability to decide why one sentence is interesting while another is not.
Although the humans involved in the creation of Edmond de Belamy were essentially cut out of the art’s creation narrative, the AI itself was often spoken about as having human-like characteristics.
They thought it would be particularly useful for writing in a certain voice or character, or for coming up with thematically exciting words. They wondered what kind of thesaurus would come from a corpus of nautical novels (like Moby Dick)
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.
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.
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.
Maybe the creative work is now to figure out ways to nudge AIs into being weird and interesting rather than producing inane imitations of the most ordinary human writing
In particular, anthropomorphizing the AI system mitigates the responsibility to the artist, while bolstering the responsibility of the technologist. Critically, this suggests that the responsibility that will be allocated to individuals in the creation of AI art will be dependent on the choice of language and framing used to discuss it