Isabelle Levent

New art-making technologies change art in consistent ways, and studying the past helps us understand how things will change in the future.

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

This builds on a growing body of work that our ‘‘mind perception’’ (which manifests as inferences of intentions, beliefs, and values) meaningfully varies across individuals and shapes our moral judgments

However, we often found that it was the unexpected differences between the prompt and the generated image’s interpretation of it that yielded new insight for and excitement from participants.

This is posing questions to writers everywhere: Which parts of writing are so tedious you’d be happy to see them go? Which parts bring you the inexplicable joy of creating something from nothing? And what is it about writing you hold most dear? 

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

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.”

In many instances, to say that some technologies are inherently political is to say that certain widely accepted reasons of practical necessity–especially the need to maintain critical technological systems as smoothly working entities–have tended to eclipse other sorts of moral and political reasoning.