What does an empathetic collaboration between Artificial Intelligence and Creative Practitioners’ look like and how will this shape the future of creative practice in an AI-centric society?
Recognizing the potential in a science-arts collaboration, the UK government is now considering promoting STEAM education while also investing in research on the effects of AI on the Creative Economy. In America, IBM and MIT announced a 10-year partnership in 2017 to research on AI.
Contrasting the opportunity for this timely research is the challenge where the norm has been to explore ‘creative AI’ from a technology and marketing perspective, with results bordering experimentation for the sake of experimentation. This may result in AI getting unprecedented power over practitioners where the ambiguity exists because creative practitioners have not actively participated in defining the rules of the collaboration and the desired outcomes.
Addressing this algorithmic problem called AI from a creative perspective raises pressing questions like ‘What is the role of AI in creative practice? What are the absolute essentials in the AI-Creative Practitioner collaboration? What is the guiding framework that can prepare creative practitioners for a prolific collaboration?’
A typical work day gets interrupted.
‘Sarah, Nina, Dave, Martin and Susan were sat in the collaboration room. They were brainstorming scenarios to create strategies for the Future of Work and each had a very specific role to play, critically engaging with one another’s ideas. As a design research intern, Sarah spent endless amount of time on site, interviewing stakeholders. Nina was the design strategist and Dave, the spatial experience designer. Together with Martin, the graphic designer and Susan, the marketing and communication analyst, they were engrossed in developing insightful, human-centric solutions.
There was an interruption. They were interrupted by James, the new recruit. The company secretary introduced James as Artificial Intelligence, a.k.a A.I., and the flow of the group felt immediately challenged.
While Martin felt threatened, Susan’s eyes shone brightly as she saw opportunity in collaborating with A.I. to communicate with her audience more effectively. Deeply skeptical were Sarah, Dave and Nina as they had troublesome thoughts about loosing empathy and human-centricity to AI’s methods and solutions. They feared that an AI-centric creative process will lead to a chaotic society where everything runs on detached algorithms. It will loose out on creating rich design solutions that are dictated by the complexity and the ambiguity of human emotions and intuition.’
Based on current trends, this scenario is illustrative of what will occur in the near future, which raises pertinent questions —
‘What is the role of AI in creative practice? What are the absolute essentials in the AI-Creative Practitioner collaboration? What is the guiding framework that can prepare creative practitioners for a prolific collaboration?’
According to the blog Artist+AI = Creativity² by NESTA, a UK based innovation charity, ‘2018 will be the year that machines break ground in the final, most taboo frontier: creativity.” While sonnets, stories and pop ballads created by AI have stirred the interest of experimenters, how does one make sense of these experiments and what is the guiding framework for ethical experimentation? Without controlled experimentation, AI is left to take on the role of the decision maker, the inspirer (as in Generative AI), the mundane task doer, or it may be a combination in different circumstances. The idea is to thus, address these questions at its ripest hour, which is now, and create a framework and strategies for this creative collaboration in an informed manner.
While the UK government targets creating 1 million creative jobs by 2030, the US, according to a 2016 report had ‘the largest creative economy employment of the US, UK and Canada, employing 14.2 million people.’
In September 2017, IBM announced a 10-year partnership with MIT, into artificial intelligence research where ‘one strand of research will look at potential applications for AI across various industries’. On the IBM website, the article ‘the quest for AI creativity’ summarises the opinions of 30 AI experts and thought leaders on ‘whether AI has the potential to become a true creative partner or even the creator of solo works of art.’ Creative.ai brings ‘AI to studios and agencies in creative industries around the world.’ In spite of the creative approach, I’m afraid they delve into creative AI from an obvious technology perspective. I think it is time we have a more grounded approach in defining the rules of the collaboration, the desired outcomes and steer clear of creative experimentation for the sake of producing creative artworks by insisting on an active participation of creative practitioners.
Engaging creatives like architects/urban designer, artist, web/graphic designer and PR/marketing professional; AI scientists and coders through interviews, focus groups and speculative design workshops, can we produce blogs, zines and an online ‘Open Lab’ for the stakeholders with a manifesto for the AI-Creatives collaboration and help one another skill-up for the imminent future?
