So much talk of "empowering" creatives & artists with ever more complex machine learning "augmentation tools". While that's fun, If you really care about empowering creatives, design social systems that *pay creatives real living wages*. Automation won't provide that.
Was on a panel last week called "Digitaler Salon: Zahlen, die malen" on the topic of Creativity + AI. If you can speak german and don't mind some rambling, have a look:
"Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries"
Beyond doom and gloom, there is hope: The vision/opportunity I sense is phenomenal: Creative AI tools could help raise the global level of literacy, creativity and empathy, by dramatically shortening the time of thought to highly communicative (possibly multimodal) artefacts. Many moons ago I wrote this extensive piece on the sector, from a more hopeful, slightly utopian perspective: https://medium.com/@creativeai/creativeai-9d4b2346faf3
Yet the reality of creative industries today looks very different: Advertising runs the show (see Google etc) - which is really just a synonym for either "spam" or "social engineering" - both horrible for societies in times of climate change - and not conducive as objective functions for more creativity or education. In the sense of raw reach & economic impact, the advertising industry is arguably the most powerful "art form" of the 21st century. And so when you ask for "concrete example" of dystopian generative systems, we must look at developments in this area.
One of the influential developer of creative tools - Adobe - recently has doubled down on the intersection of """AI""" and """Creativity""", with their "Sensei" Initiative. Guess who they are targeting with their tools? Yes, Advertisers. In the sector of advertising, the quality VS quantity debate is very different: it is NOT about the values of art in the classical sense, or about storytelling or other humane things - it is about naked money. This is a clearly parameterized signal to feed to machines as loss/reward-function - and due to this fake clarity, such systems can grow like cancer.
Such economic success is precisely what drives humans to extend generative advertising logic to other creative fields. Repetitive generative muzak in the charts and endlessly boring superhero movie rehashes on the screen are a reality already today, and all using some form of "optimisation" algorithms. And so we see the rise of "creative" botnets - the rise of fake news and ever more fractaline simulacra's (see this post: https://samim.io/p/2018-04-23-the-solution-to-exploding-fake-news-and-spam-botnets-ca/)
I personally do not agree with the politics and dynamics of the visions outlined here. My writing is meant as a warning pointer in search space. We must strive towards more appealing outcomes, for humanities sanity and well-being in times of climate change might very well depend on it.
Role of the audience in creative arts is underestimated. When an artist performs, they've audience in front/back of their mind. Who do ANNs think about when performing?
The 3 stages of Creative AI: #ML#Creativity#Ideas 1. Discovery: "Wow, ML can generate creative stuff, crazy!" 2. Reality: "Oh, tech and creativity are hard! ML is not magic after all." 3. Wisdom: "How" to generate is interesting - but deciding "What" to generate "Why" is the art of life.
As the quality of naturallanguage generated by artifcial intelligence systems improves, writing interfaces can support interventions beyond grammar-checking and spell-checking, such as suggesting content to spark new ideas. To explore the possibility of machine-in-the-loop creative writing, we performed two case studies using two system prototypes, one for short story writing and one for slogan writing. Participants in our studies were asked to write with a machine in the loop or alone (control condition).
