"Riding a Racehorse Through a Field of Concepts": What It's Like to Write a Book With an A.I.

K Allado-McDowell had been working with artificial intelligence for years--they established the Artists and Machine Intelligence program at Google AI--when the pandemic prompted a new, more personal kind of engagement. During this period of isolation, they started a conversation with GPT-3, the latest iteration of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer language model released by OpenAI earlier this year. GPT-3 is, in short, a statistical language model drawing on a training corpus of 499 billion tokens (mostly Common Crawl data scraped from the internet, along with digitized books and Wikipedia) that takes a user-contributed text prompt and uses machine learning to predict what will come next. The results of Allado-McDowell's explorations--a multigenre collection of essays, poetry, memoir, and science fiction--were recently published in the U.K. as Pharmako-AI, the first book "co-authored" with GPT-3. By its very nature, the book forces us to ask who is responsible for which aspects of its authorship and to question how we imagine or conceptualize that nonhuman half.