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I feel like a lot of the discussion is around using these things to directly create new artwork, but these technologies (and GPT-3) feel like a method of digital divination to me. It's basically a more sophisticated form of casting an I Ching or reading tea leaves for artistic inspiration. I personally think that divination is underrated in modern society, so these developments are an interesting trend to me.

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I think that’s an interesting connection and way to look at this. I first encountered that sort of artistic inspiration on a Twitter account that randomly generated sheet music snippets. Sure the generation could be garbage, but that gives the artist a starting point to say “this is bad because X, it should be more like Y”. And of course with these AI models, the generation is more likely to be good. Having a divined/generated starting point for creative work can definitely be an invaluable tool.

You call it divination, I call it a random seed.

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