Isabelle Levent

User-generated content platforms were a huge source for the image data. WordPress-hosted blogs on wp.com and wordpress.com represented 819k images together, or 6.8% of all images. Other photo, art, and blogging sites included 232k images from Smugmug, 146k from Blogspot, 121k images were from Flickr, 67k images from DeviantArt, 74k from Wikimedia,

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.”

What’s difficult is to state our aesthetic values clearly enough to enable the program itself to make the evaluation at each generation.

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. 

For a computer to make a subtle combinational joke, never mind to assess its tastefulness, would require, first, a data-base with a richness comparable to ours, and, second, methods of link-making (and link-evaluating) comparable in subtlety with ours. 

Our intuitive moral understanding of actors and transgressions may be at odds with the inherent complexity of AI systems.

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. 

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.