Isabelle Levent

You must never think at the typewriter — you must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway. (Ray Bradbury)

Even when these paragraphs fail, they make her interested in the story again. She’s curious about this computer-generated text, and it reignites her interest in her own writing.

For a computer to make a subtle combinational joke, never mind to assess its tastefulness, would require, first, a data-base with a richness comparable to ours, and, second, methods of link-making (and link-evaluating) comparable in subtlety with ours. 

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.

If I have an idea for a novel, but the computer writes most of it, is it still my story? This question will not be answered with numbers about how many words I or the computer wrote. It’s going to be answered culturally; it’s going to be a feeling we have about where authenticity or truth really lies.

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.

Indeed, AI is a diffuse term that corresponds to a web of human actors and computational processes interacting in complex ways