This study was devised and the site programmed using Text Synth (see below) by Geoff Davis for post-graduate research at UAL CCI 2020.
The Supervisor was Professor Mick Grierson, Research Leader, UAL Creative Computing Institute. Respondents were other post-graduate students.
Images used as prompts:
Clown Eggs
Cover image from a novel, The Silver Eggheads by Fritz Leiber 1958
In the event, only the Clown Egg images were used.
Silver Eggheads, a satirical novel, is about computer creative writing machines causing chaos. Back cover:
“Meet some of the insufferably zany characters that inhabit the mad, gay, heady world of the arts”.
Text Synth Generator
A publicly available text generator was used here, as this is the sort of system people might use outside of the study.
It was also not practical to recreate (program, train, fine-
tune, host) a large scale text generation system for this usability pre-study.
Visit the AI Poetry system (depreciated)
Prompt images were shown separately. Notes were recorded to file.
Fabrice Bellard, coder of Text Synth:
Text Synth is build using the GPT-2 language model released by Google OpenAI. It is a neural network of 1.5 billion parameters based on the Transformer architecture.
GPT-2 was trained to predict the next word on a large database of 40 GB of internet texts. The user interface is inspired from talktotransformer.com [now retired]. Thanks to OpenAI for providing their GPT-2 model.
For details on how to change the parameters, should you wish to, please see Text Synth Technical Notes from the experiment’s left panel.
Permission was granted to use Text Synth in the study by Fabrice Bellard Jul 7 2020.
Powered by textsynth.
See bellard.org
Credits
Clown Eggs
The collection is owned by Clowns International and is housed at Wookey Hole in Somerset.
The Eggs here were all painted by the Egg Artist Kate Stone. Text is from the Clown Egg Register book.
Visit https://www.lukestephenson.com/clown-eggs
Novel: ‘Dancing with Robots’ image is from the cover of second edition of The Silver Eggheads by Fritz Leiber (1958). Image from Mass Market paperback, 1961.
Original Study dog and man image prompt
The image is from public sources under free license. It transpires that the dog is called Maxine and has 500,000 followers on Instagram.
GPT-2
Visit OpenAI’s blog for more information on Google’s OpenAI text generation.
CST
A new creativity support tool (CST) is now at Story Live
Please also visit my previous writing software, a zooming text and image writing system, Notes Story Board
Copyright
Who owns the generated text?
This summary is from Adam King (coder of Talk to Transformer):
This seems to be a complicated issue. We can’t give legal advice, so if you rely a solid answer you’ll need to consult a legal professional.
We do however waive any rights we may have in the text you generate and grant you licence to use it for any purpose (to the extent that we have that right), royalty-free and without warranty. You don’t have to credit us anywhere.
To hint at the complexity of this issue, consider that the neural network is:
1) designed and trained by OpenAI who licensed its source under the MIT license,
2) learned from millions of web pages containing content in which many people hold copyright,
3) is hosted by us (we waive all rights to the content) and
4) is conditioned on the prompt you give it (your own content).