flâneur

Navigating the World of Infinite Content

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In early 2021, I created an art piece titled “20,000 Love Poems and a Song of Despair.” I generated 20,000 love poems in the style of Pablo Neruda with GPT-J and GPT-Neo-X, printed them, and read them in a gallery for 10 hours in downtown Oakland. Something that struck me about this project was that I had just flung 20k new poems into existence, and most of them (like probably 95% of them) will never be experienced by any one. This is analogous with what we can expect in the coming years as generative AI content begins to proliferate: There’s going to be more content than we know what to do with. What happens when seemingly infinite streams of new content and information are created at a scale and speed that is impossible for humans to consume? You may be familiar with Jorge Luis Borges’s short story The Library of Babel. Here Borges describes a universe that takes the form of a library: an enormous expanse of interconnected hexagonal rooms, filled with all possible books containing ev

In early 2021, I created an art piece titled “20,000 Love Poems and a Song of Despair.” I generated 20,000 love poems in the style of Pablo Neruda with GPT-J and GPT-Neo-X, printed them, and read them in a gallery for 10 hours in downtown Oakland. Something that struck me about this project was that I had just flung 20k new poems into existence, and most of them (like probably 95% of them) will never be experienced by any one. This is analogous with what we can expect in the coming years as generative AI content begins to proliferate: There’s going to be more content than we know what to do…

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