< return to HITL thought experiment

What other questions should we have asked?

Who is the author of this text?

GPT-3. (Gender: nonbinary. Age: unknown. Nationality: “of the world.")

A fictional construct, an AI trained to generate text based on a collection of documents, perhaps a deepfake of a long-dead author to lend credence to the words. Beyond that, it matters little.

It is tempting to take the easy way out and answer that the reader himself is the author. As a member of an internet-using, western society, the reader has undoubtedly contributed to the text in some small or large way.

We do not know. The text was released anonymously on a secure channel and picked up by the curators for this exhibition. It appears to be genuine. We have reasons to doubt that the person or persons who authored this work are human.

Does it matter?

Does a single snowflake care which vagabond swept it from a cloud and set it adrift down to earth?