Isabelle Levent

The deepest cases of creativity involve someone’s thinking something which, with respect to the conceptual spaces in their minds, they  couldn’t  have thought before. The supposedly impossible idea can come about only if the creator changes the pre-existing style in some way. It must be tweaked, or even radically transformed, so that thoughts are

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.

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

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.

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

Strict synonymy, or even a drop-in replacement word, is not essential for most writers, who instead may use a thesaurus to expand an idea or discover a new one. 

My lesson from these two examples is that it might be possible to make prompting “invisible” by making it part of the UI, and finetuning output for as much of the writer’s context as possible to make it more useful. Latency matters, and cost matters, which are wonderful because these tend to be “regular engineering” type problems rather than AI

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.”