Isabelle Levent

Imagine an art-lover at an exhibition entitled ‘Dots 2008’. He speaks to two artists, each displaying a painting. In both cases, the art-lover cannot see past the seemingly random arrangement of dots of paint. He mentions this to the first artist, who says: “Oh, no, they’re not randomly placed. Each dot represents a friend of mine. The colour of

In the course of a year, the tech industry’s dreary post-social, post-crypto interregnum was rapidly supplanted — largely as the result of public-facing efforts by OpenAI, which is reportedly in talks with Microsoft about a potential $10 billion investment — by a story about inevitable technologies that are  so  transformative,  so  incomprehensibl

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,

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.

Like oil and land, data are a common that is commodified by private actors for profits. The commons being commodified is our essence as humans: our interactions with society at large.

Whereas if you put them in a group, they’ll go “dog” and someone else will go “space dog” and someone else will go “Aztec space dog,” and then all of a sudden, people understand the possibilities, and you’re creating this augmented imagination — an environment where people can learn and play with this new capacity. So we found that people really

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.