Isabelle Levent

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.”

Academically, this is a collision of everything from computer science and art history to media studies to disruptive innovation to labor economics, and no one of these disciplines seems sufficient to cover the topic. 

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.”

It becomes a question of who created a certain work of art.

If it was possible to deduce how much of an influence each individual image has on the final outcome (and the owner of each image was known and labelled, which I currently doubt happens), would it be simple to compensate people then?

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

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

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. 

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.