‘Pharmako-AI’ and the Possibilities of Machine Creativity – The Atlantic

In response, GPT-3 appears to agree: In the process of witnessing these biases, we have been able to better appreciate the richness of female contribution to GPT. What we have lost is the story of the grandmothers of GPT, the grandmothers of the culture of GPT, the grandmothers of cybernetics. Shortly after listing its grandmothers, it launches into a poem with the first line My grandfather was a machine. Not only does the AI immediately acknowledge that it has perpetuated gender bias in computational history; it then re-mythologizes itself (ironically?) as the product of male mastery, in the form of loose rhyme. Allado-McDowell changes tack in response. Perhaps these types of unexpected twists lead Allado-McDowell to later liken the experience to learning to play a new musical instrumentstriking a chord and hearing it return with new overtones.

This is not the first time a computer has authored a book. To name one notable prior example, in 2016, a Japanese research team advanced past the first stage of a literary competition with a novel assembled by an algorithm. The striking difference with Pharmako-AI is that it is not packaged as a novelty or proof of concept. Allado-McDowell does not ask GPT-3 to provide a service or mimic a known style of writing to prove its level of competence. For Allado-McDowell, the experience entailed a reckoning with machine intelligence, but was also self-confrontational. Sometimes it really did feel like being on drugs, they said during the U.K. book-launch event. I thought, Is this real? Am I just talking to myself?

While reading, I, too, often forgot which author was speaking. I gave up trying to judge whether the AI is a so-called good writer, or for that matter, whether Allado-McDowell is. The juxtaposition of their voices is simply more than the sum of its parts.

Although we dont typically think about work in these terms, it is not a stretch to say that humans collaborate daily, if unconsciously, with nonhumans, both organic and machinic. The bacteria in our gut biomes influence our mental states; the technical interfaces we use shape the way we imagine and create. As machines become more intelligentand, incidentally, as we discover more about the deep intelligence of plants and animalsthe myth of the human genius whose divine inspiration sparks from nowhere starts to seem inadequate, if not quaint. GPT-3 puts it like this in the book: Theres no single artist, because the art is not any one creature, it is the collective action and interaction of the creatures.

Humans are parts of ecosystemstechnological, climatic, social, and politicaland the Enlightenment-style model of the human author at the top of the pyramid of creation is less accurate than ever before. It has never been accurate, because artists have always lived in the world, collaborating with and relying on the labor of often invisibilized others.

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'Pharmako-AI' and the Possibilities of Machine Creativity - The Atlantic