Isabelle Levent

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. 

A poem, I would say, is the site where “hollow and void” poetry is tactically deployed in a physical and social context, in order to achieve a particular effect. The poem unites poetry with an intention. So yes, a language model can indeed (and can only) write poetry, but only a person can write a poem.

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

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.”

Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations,

The Lab’s mission is also to develop a critical literacy that can help cultural institutions approach AI technologies as advanced and multilayered media. While reliant on the highly specialised theoretical work needed to untangle issues such as ‘distributed authorship’ (Ascott 2005; Zeilinger 2021) involved in artistic research, the Lab does not