ROBOT VOICE 1: And now, a roundtable discussion about automated text generation and what it means for the creative world. Here’s Aaron Brezel with more.
BREZEL 1: Thanks for the introduction Rob. Even Artists can’t escape the talk of automation these days.
AI-generated art has been on the scene for a few years now. Christies auctioned off a portait made by a computer for a whopping $432,000 in 2018. But this year – perhaps thanks to a bit of viral marketing – a program called GPT-2 is generating its fair share of buzz. It’s a computer program that can automatically generate sentences. Kind of like your email’s text prediction on steroids.
When Open AI, a Silicon Valley non-profit released the program, they made some suggestions about its potential uses. One was to create an unstoppable army of talkative robots to drive discourse on the internet and destroy the world. No offense Rob. ROBOT VOICE 2: None taken. Another was to serve as a writing assistant – to help people overcome writer’s block. Sigal Samuel, a staff writer at Vox, says she’s using it to write her next novel. Using this program seems easy enough. You input a sentence or two into a text box and out GPT-2 spits out what it thinks should come next.
And that’s what we’re going to try today. With me are three Columbia University experts who are going to help us unpack GPT-2 as a creative assist. I’ve talked enough. Let’s go around and introduce yourselves.
BREZEL 2: Later, we’ll spin up GPT-2 and try it out for ourselves But before we get there, I want to see if we can’t pull back the curtain a little bit. To a lot of people, myself included, GPT-2 seemed like this fascinating paradigm shift in the world of automatic text generation. But Katy, you were telling me a few days ago that the story of computational creative-assists is actually quite old – ancient even …