Optimization Is Not All You Need

In 2019, OpenAI released two million GPT-2 outputs-ungrammatical, half broken-to aid the detection of machine-generated text. The alignment that produced their more fluent successors is usually regarded as an engineering achievement; we read it instead as the newest expression of optimization culture: the conviction, older than the technology, that measurable improvement along predefined axes exhausts the question of value. Tracing that conviction through the stack-pretraining, decoding, preference tuning, benchmarking, interface-and back through its genealogy in the audit society, we arrive at the limit: an optimization procedure can measure how improbable a piece of generated text is; it cannot tell whether that unlikelihood is error or invention. A procedure that cannot make that distinction has nonetheless, within half a decade, assumed the authority to set the protocols of legitimate language. Held for centuries by academies and schoolrooms, grammars and examiners, this authority has been given over to loss functions, reward models, benchmarks, and system prompts: an apparatus that executes the office of judgment with no capacity for judging.

How to Do Things with Deep Learning Code

The premise of this article is that a basic understanding of the composition and functioning of large language models is critically urgent. To that end, we extract a representational map of OpenAI's GPT-2 with what we articulate as two classes of deep learning code, that which pertains to the model and that which underwrites applications built around the model. We then verify this map through case studies of two popular GPT-2 applications: the text adventure game, AI Dungeon, and the language art project, This Word Does Not Exist. Such an exercise allows us to test the potential of Critical Code Studies when the object of study is deep learning code and to demonstrate the validity of code as an analytical focus for researchers in the subfields of Critical Artificial Intelligence and Critical Machine Learning Studies. More broadly, however, our work draws attention to the means by which ordinary users might interact with, and even direct, the behavior of deep learning systems, and by extension works toward demystifying some of the auratic mystery of "AI." What is at stake is the possibility of achieving an informed sociotechnical consensus about the responsible applications of large language models, as well as a more expansive sense of their creative capabilities-indeed, understanding how and where engagement occurs allows all of us to become more active participants in the development of machine learning systems.