After Hours Salon: The Dearth of the Author

​Conversations that spill over into the night.

​We're back for our third Salon.We'd love you to bring drinks and snacks to share again!

The Dearth of the Author - on the changing nature of authorship and intent in the Age of AI.

The Salon:

​We’re bringing together techno-optimists and sceptics, deep-thinkers and concerned citizens to discuss the future. Expect drinks, nibbles, a few provocations from people who've thought hard about this.

​We’re going to start the discussion amongst a few sector specialists then let it propagate into informal chats.

​We will kick this off at 7, so please arrive promptly.

​The location - a 5 min walk from Old St, will be shared with registered attendees only, the day before the event.

Background

shamelessly stolen from Alys Key's piece here.

In his seminal 1967 essay “The Death of the Author”, French critic Roland Barthes argued for divorcing a text’s meaning from its author’s intention. Instead of scrying what a writer meant when they put words on the page, we should look instead at the effect those words have on the reader.

Now, with the advent of AI-generated writing, the concept of the author’s intent is becoming hazy. When you put a 100-word prompt into ChatGPT and get a 500-word blogpost back, how much of that can be said to reflect your original intent? How much reflects the intent of the thousands of people who wrote different texts, on which the AI has been trained? How much is the intent of the machine itself?

Max Kreminski, an AI research scientist at Midjourney and formerly of the Santa Clara University, has a term for this spreading-thin of the prompter’s original intention, inspired by Barthes. They call it “The Dearth of the Author”.

This goes far beyond writing. As more and more of our creative work and even operations get streamlined with AI, to whom do we ascribe the title of author and the message and intent that that should bring?

The Specialists

we are delighted to be joined by...

Ben Butler who runs Bunsen, a creative studio built for tech, and Broadsheet, beautiful business writing.

Celine Nguyen, a software designer (Watershed, ex–Notion and Palantir) and writes the newsletter personal canon about literature, culture and technology.

Jon Steinback, former Creative lead at DeepMind, now co-founder of Marker - the word processor of the future, full of AI-powered tools to help people write better.

and guiding the discussion is Alys Key, a freelance journalist keeping a check on the pulse of the tech ecosystem at UK 2.0.