Keynote^EN

This keynote looks at the recent developments in artificial intelligence—namely, the text generation prowess of GPT-3—and contrasts it with earlier heuristics in AI research. Through this process, I will highlight how different styles of research unearth different capabilities and facets of the complex problem that is human language. From mathematical logic to answering middle-school quizzes to describing the world and penning short stories, AI has already had many successes and many drawbacks in their literary endeavours. What we will see, then, is that the current results in natural language processing are the consequence of a shift from mind to matter. Some of the implications for the kind of texts which are, or could be, produced with large-scale Transformer architectures will be explored.

Pierre Depaz is an academic, developer and artist. Having graduated from the IEP de Lille and NYU Tisch School of the Arts, he is currently a Lecturer of Interactive Media at NYU Berlin and a guest Lecturer at Sciences Po Paris, as he completes his doctoral thesis on the role of aesthetics in the understandings of source code at Paris-3 Sorbonne-Nouvelle, under the direction of Alexandre Gefen and Nick Montfort.

His academic research revolves around how software systems create representational frameworks for inter- and intra-personal organization, and includes publications such as Computer Simulations as Political Manifestos (Goethe Institute, 2016), L’agit-prop à l’ère 2.0 : les campagnes du collectif Kazeboon dans l’Égypte en Révolution (CIRCAV vol. 27, 2018) and Coroutines (Officialfan.club, 2018).

His artistic practice includes digital games, computer simulations, interactive installations, networked performances and experimental web projects, and has been exhibited in NYC, Paris, Cairo, Abu Dhabi, Brussels and Berlin. He's written software for, amongst others, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, the Washington Post, the Open Society Foundations and the Bezirksamt-Neukölln—as well as this website.