Pushing the Boundaries of AI and Creativity
Separating science fiction from real-world implications at the Seattle Design Festival
“This world doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to us,” Dolores whispered ominously into Teddy’s ear in the season one finale of HBO’s Westworld.
This is the critical moment where Dolores, an AI android in a fantastical theme park that invites people to pursue all hedonistic impulses, becomes sentient and realizes that she and the other androids must revolt against their human creators.
Robots taking over the world is not a new idea. And neither is the fear of them stealing our jobs. However, this current boom in computing power and the development of revolutionary algorithms collecting more data than ever before means we are one step closer to delivering truly intelligent experiences — and perhaps turning these uncertainties into realities.
What does this mean for designers? At the Seattle Design Festival, a panel of Seattle artists, designers, and engineers who currently work with AI gathered to examine creative challenges and opportunities in the age of AI.
Rethinking our monopoly on creativity
There are a lot of think pieces about how AI impacts design, and many of these articles try to alleviate the fear that AI will replace designers by highlighting ways we can work with AI (while reassuring designers that they’re still needed). The panelists pivoted the conversation to focus on the root of these concerns: if machines start being “creative,” how are we different from the device on our desk?
Panel moderator and partner director of UX at Microsoft Jon Friedman discussed the assumptions behind these fears. “There’s an inherent bias we have as humans that we own creativity, and there’s an interesting conversation happening around what is being ‘taken away from us’ right now,” he said.
“I think that it’s very important that we release the kind of anthropic copyright on ideas like beauty and creativity. There’s an extraordinary self-centeredness about believing that those things are somehow uniquely human,” added Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a software engineer at Google.
Robert Twomey, assistant professor of digital media at Youngstown State University, suggested analyzing AI-related dread through the lens of the Industrial Revolutions, which consistently threatened job security. He asked his fellow panelists, “Are AI tools distinct from the long line of technologies that have replaced human labor in our history?”
“AI tools are quite different,” answered Mira Lane, partner director of Ethics and Society at Microsoft. “When you look at a paintbrush or a camera, as an artist you control that instrument. You don’t wield an AI tool in the same way. There’s more of a dialogue: an artist inputs an idea, the AI produces an output, and the artist responds.”
Lane continued, “AI tools are fundamentally different in that sense, and the work itself is profound because AI has the ability to impersonate and compose. I experimented to see if I could automate some of my creative work, and it was wildly unsatisfying as an artist to have this machine start spitting things out that looked like your work — so I went analog for a while.”
A flexible new frontier
On the flip side, if designers can learn to embrace AI, it can help amplify human creativity in unprecedented ways. By working in tandem with AI, every panelist agreed we could tackle problems that humans alone could not.
“These sorts of tools can just massively proliferate options, and that becomes superhuman. Machine-assisted creativity is a new domain where new solutions could come from,” said Twomey.
“With AI, we can optimize resources to design things that are more interesting and beautiful,” noted Aguera y Arcas. “We can even use generative design to bring back the Beaux Arts movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries,” he suggested.
Lane added, “We should look at AI as a clay. We should mold and play with it because it’s so early versus looking at it like fixed Lego blocks that only work a certain way. It’s early enough in the creative space that we can really make things and break the system in ways that we hadn’t even thought about.”
“As artists, we can use AI to harness chaos and complexity to find unexpected signals and beauty in the noise. We can parse, recode, and connect to values and patterns that exceed our grasp.”
Designing AI with ethics in mind
AI impacts our lives daily. From the voice assistant on your smartphone to the music or movie streaming service you use, these technologies have fundamentally changed our lifestyles. And with this increasing presence, the panelists believe it’s imperative to discuss the ethical implications of AI.
“We’re moving so fast that we don’t even have the ability to fully comprehend what this technology is doing to us,” cautioned Asta Roseway, principal research designer at Microsoft. “When you start to facilitate AI experiences, there are real-world consequences.”
“I don’t think any of us who were in computer science or mathematics were required to take an ethics class, but it is required in medical school,” Lane said. “It’s something that we have to insist on at this point because the technology in our lives is shaping the way that we behave and interact. We need the technologist to have some level of thoughtfulness and responsibility toward what they’re building.”
“Ethical decision making and consideration of consequence should be built into each of these AI systems as they’re deployed or developed,” Twomey recommended.
Assistant DXARTS professor at the University of Washington, Afroditi Psarra, argued that we also need to gather multiple points of view to scrutinize the work. “I think artists, theorists, scientists, technologists, and engineers need a place to come together and have these discussions,” Psarra said. “It’s really important to create a network of different perspectives to examine the social, cultural implications of emerging technologies like AI.”
Let’s not be so fatalistic
By the evening’s end, one thing was clear: there’s a lot more to talk about.
AI is no longer a dystopian future — it’s here, and it’s really not that bad! Some even think it’s promising. Worry less about AI stealing jobs and focus more on evolving our definition of creativity to include AI. Because when we consider AI as a collaborative partner instead of a threat, the world is no longer “theirs” or “ours.” It belongs to everyone.
Are you working with AI? Let us know what you’re ruminating over in the comments below.
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