[antiterra]

After a period of significant novelty, GPT-3 reveals itself to be something other than a magical fountain of ingenuity. However, ‘useless’ is going too far when talking about it as a writing tool. It can serve a similar purpose as generative games and techniques such as ‘exquisite cadaver’ or free writing.

One of the difficult things to do in art is to make something that makes some kind of sense but doesn’t simply follow an obvious logical path. Robert Frost put this as ‘no surprise for the writer, [then] no surprise for the reader.’ These leaps, or ‘illogical conclusions’ occupy a non-polynomial space of endless parameters. It’s like a traveling salesman problem where we aren’t sure where the salesman wants to be or how he traveled, until he has made it to his destination. Generative AI can help search the problem space.