Isabelle Levent

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

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.

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.

Indeed, AI is a diffuse term that corresponds to a web of human actors and computational processes interacting in complex ways

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

Because creativity  by definition  involves not only novelty but value, and because values are highly variable, it follows that many arguments about creativity are rooted in disagreements about value. 

Now none of this is meant to say that I think programmers, artists and engineers have no responsibilities when it comes to the outputs of machine learning models. In fact, I think we bear responsibility for everything these models do. (I never, for example, attribute authorship to a program or a model. If I publish the results of a text generator,