Isabelle Levent

The Lab’s primary focus is on the ways in which artists and designers are adopting, adapting and remaking AI processes, building their own datasets and reaching into the ‘grey box’ of AI technologies. 

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

"The data we licensed from Shutterstock was critical to the training of DALL-E,” said Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO. “We’re excited for Shutterstock to offer DALL-E images to its customers as one of the first deployments through our API, and we look forward to future collaborations as artificial intelligence becomes an integral part of artists’

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. 

As part of this model where the ‘back-end’ gets more attention than the artefact, a systematic dismantling of the myth of ‘the artist’ as a stand-alone genius, standing above, or aside from the world, needs to be enacted.

Maybe the creative work is now to figure out ways to nudge AIs into being weird and interesting rather than producing inane imitations of the most ordinary human writing

They thought it would be particularly useful for writing in a certain voice or character, or for coming up with thematically exciting words. They wondered what kind of thesaurus would come from a corpus of nautical novels (like Moby Dick)

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.