AIwriting: Relations Between Image Generation and Digital Writing
Scott Rettberg Talan Memmott Jill Walker Rettberg Jason Nelson Patrick Lichty
During 2022, both transformer-based AI text generation sys-tems such as GPT-3
and AI text-to-image generation systems such as DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion
made exponential leaps forward and are unquestionably altering the fields of
digital art and electronic literature. In this panel a group of electronic
literature authors and theorists consider new oppor-tunities for human
creativity presented by these systems and present new works have produced
during the past year that specifically address these systems as environments
for literary expressions that are translated through iterative interlocutive
processes into visual representations. The premise that binds these
presentations is that these systems and the works gener-ated must be considered
from a literary perspective, as they originate in human writing. In works
ranging from a visual memoir of the personal experience of a health crisis, to
interac-tive web comics, to architectures based on abstract poetic language, to
political satire, four artists explore the capabili-ties of these writing
environments for new genres of literary artist practice, while a digital
culture theorist considers the origins and effects of the particular training
datasets of human language and images on which these new hybrid forms are
based.