“AIwriting: Relations Between Image Generation and Digital Writing” presented by Rettberg, Rettberg, Memmott, Nelson and Lichty

During 2022, both transformer-based AI text generation systems 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 opportunities for human creativity enabled by these systems and present new works 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 generated 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 interactive web comics, to architectures based on abstract poetic language, to political satire, four artists explore the capabilities of these writing environments for new genres of literary art 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.