Sterling Crispin, “GPT Paintings”

RRose Editions, 2021

Edition of 200 copies
Softcover with Swiss Binding
202 pages
Riso print on Clairbook paper
Silkscreened cover

” These paintings are artworks I created in collaboration with an artificial intelligence system. The AI system is called GPT and was developed by the company OpenAI. The goal of GPT is to try to predict what words might come next when presented with an example of writing. To achieve this goal, a neural network was trained on on billions of examples of text written by people, and the network attempted to learn the structure of human language. To create the paintings I used a pen plotter, a kind of printer that’s sort of like a robot arm, to write the AI generated phrases onto the artwork. The phrases on the paintings were generated by giving AI system this artist statement you are reading now about the work. It attempts to complete the the meaning of the artwork for me, generating phrases like,…[GPT output] “