Isabelle Levent

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 lot of the famous artists who use the platform, they’re all saying the same thing, and it’s really interesting. They say, “I feel like Midjourney is an art student, and it has its own style, and when you invoke my name to create an image, it’s like asking an art student to make something inspired by my art. And generally, as an artist, I want

the reconfiguration of culture as a domain of not just human-made meanings but also machinic calculation

They will shade our constant submissions to the vast digital commons, intentional or consensual or mandatory, with the knowledge that every selfie or fragment of text is destined to become a piece of general-purpose training data for the attempted automation of everything. They will be used on people in extremely creative ways, with and without

There’s another edge case as well; in theory, with the same prompts and the random seed that’s used for generating the images, you could end up with someone else generating the same, or a very similar, image as what you created. 

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.”