Machines have no narratives

Machines do not have their own narratives

Art which relies on the artist’s narrative to be whatever kind of art it is, like Torres’s Untitled cannot yet come from a machine, because the narrative is always the same.

A model was trained, a prompt was given, and an image was generated. The model, prompt, or image may have different content, but the story structure remains the same. I would argue that this makes the narrative of all generated images self-contained. [If you’re into that narrative, you’ll be into it.]

We can be very conservative, and this can still be true. Nick Cave, for his purposes, is right to deny ChatGPT the abilty to have meaningful expereinces But even if if we allow that, lacking consciousness, LLMs have an experience we could even ask them to represent, they still all have roughly the same experience of making an image. Perhaps if one of the current efforts succeeds in developing image generators which can be interrogated about the steps they take to produce images, we will be able to get some new narratives out of these machines.