Generative Art Timeline · Chapter 9: AI Era (2010s)

2019

OpenAI Releases GPT2

Publication

A screenshot of a browser-based GPT-2 text-generation interface, in which the model has been prompted to write about GPT-2 itself; the highlighted passages are the machine-generated continuations.
A screenshot of a browser-based GPT-2 text-generation interface, in which the model has been prompted to write about GPT-2 itself; the highlighted passages are the machine-generated continuations. Screenshot of Write With Transformer running GPT-2 large. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

“OpenAI releases a paper on GPT-2 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), an AI-powered text generation model trained on vast amounts of written text sourced via the internet; users are able to download and even fine-tune a smaller version of the model. Soon after, Gwern Branwen publishes seminal poetry experiments using GPT-2, Parrish’s Gutenberg Poetry Corpus, and Adam Daniel King releases Talk to Transformer, a no-code text generation interface.”

-Sasha Stiles

Text by Peter Bauman. Generative Art Timeline, Le Random, fact-checked September 2026.

Sources

People

Adam Daniel King, Allison Parrish, Gwern Branwen, Sasha Stiles

Movements

Computer Text, Generative Poetry

Filed under

Ideas
Computer Text, Generative Poetry, poetry
Technologies
artificial intelligence, fine-tuning, GPT-2, Internet, Large Language Model (LLM), LLMs, Talk to Transformer, text generation, transformer architecture
People
Adam Daniel King, Allison Parrish, Gwern Branwen, Sasha Stiles
Works
A Gutenberg Poetry Corpus, Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners
Organisations
OpenAI

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