ITP Alum Ross Goodwin<\/b> was recently featured in an article for Colby News,\u00a0When the Ghost in the Machine is a Poet<\/a>.<\/i>\u00a0The following is an excerpt:<\/p>\n He described his personal journey with language, writing, and large language models, including a moment of discovery that occurred when he was a graduate student in New York University\u2019s Interactive Telecommunications Program<\/b> about a decade ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n Back then, he got access to the university\u2019s high-performance computing facility and trained his own large language models to write poetry that turned out to be both weird and interesting.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt conjured imagery in a way that I had not seen generative text do before, and that, to me, was sort of the mark of something that would be an obsession for me over the next few years,\u201d Goodwin said. \u201cBecause it had, I think, the potential to augment human creativity in a real way.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n One of the major arguments against AI is that it increases human isolation by replacing human interaction with simulated companionship, but Goodwin\u2019s work shows that it doesn\u2019t have to be that way. In\u00a0one of his experiments<\/a>\u00a0as a graduate student at NYU\u2019s ITP, described as an art school for engineers and an engineering school for artists, he put a large language model inside an antique camera and instructed it to narrate an image, location, and time.<\/p>\n \u201cYou could take a picture with it, and it would print out a receipt of a poem based on the photo you captured in real time. It was like a text Polaroid,\u201d Goodwin said.\u00a0<\/p>\n He\u2019d tuck the contraption into a backpack he\u2019d wear with a printer on his waist and walk around the city, just pressing the button to take snapshots and print poetry.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt definitely invited a lot of interesting conversations and just interesting moments in time that I have captured on these receipts,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n
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