Isabelle Levent

“There are real concerns with respect to the copyright of outputs from these models and unaddressed rights issues with respect to the imagery, the image metadata and those individuals contained within the imagery,” said Peters.

Instead, I’d like us to ask: in whose voice do our machines write? What voices do they obfuscate? Where do their words come from? In short, I’d like us to ask questions about power, and the ways in which it functions through and around language. 

Crawford elaborated in an interview. “When you have this enchanted determinism, you say, we can’t possibly understand this. And we can’t possibly regulate it when it’s clearly so unknown and such a black box,” she says. “And that’s a trap.”

The fact that adding keywords like  Let’s Think Step By Step , adding “Greg Rutkowski”, prompt weights, and even negative prompting are still so enormously effective, is a sign that we are nowhere close to perfecting the “language” part of “large language models”.

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

The issue here does not concern how many jobs will be created, how much income generated, how many pollutants added... Rather, the issue has to do with the ways in which choices about technology have important consequences for the form and quality of human associations.

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