🔆 From Imagination to Existence: AI and creativity

🗞️ Issue 39 // ⏱️ Read Time: 7 min

Hello 👋

In the Midsummer Special, we looked at AI and music. This week we look at how AI tools affect our relationship with creativity. As AI tools like DALL-E, Midjourney and ChatGPT become increasingly sophisticated and widespread, a key question emerges: What does using AI do to our creativity? Is it augmenting and enhancing human imagination, or slowly replacing it? As is often the case with transformative technologies, the reality is nuanced and complex.

Use of AI Tools in Ideation and Creative Process

Generative AI has the potential to revolutionise creative processes, but how it's implemented can significantly impact its effectiveness. A recent study shows that people are most creative when working independently, rather than using AI-generated content as a starting point. However, when humans and AI collaborate on a creative project, with humans taking the lead and establishing a sense of creative self-efficacy, the benefits of AI can be fully realised. These findings highlight the importance of human autonomy and agency in creative endeavours, even when leveraging powerful AI tools.

Using AI tools support businesses by giving employees and customers new ideas and helping them refine existing ones. This can lead to a more democratic innovation process where more people can contribute.  AI can support divergent thinking by providing a vast array of options and possibilities, stimulating creativity and encouraging exploration beyond conventional approaches. By offering diverse perspectives and unconventional ideas, generative AI can help individuals and teams break free from mental blocks and discover innovative solutions.

Opportunities

• Idea generation: AI can rapidly produce numerous ideas and variations, helping creators overcome "blank page syndrome" and sparking new directions.

• Iterative refinement: AI tools allow for quick experimentation and iteration, helping refine concepts more efficiently.  

• Expanding possibilities: AI can create things humans may not have imagined, pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

• Democratising creation: User-friendly AI tools make creative pursuits more accessible to those without traditional training.

Challenges

• Originality concerns: Heavy use of AI-generated content could lead to homogenisation and less truly original human-conceived work.

• Skill atrophy: Overuse of AI assistance may cause traditional creative skills to weaken from lack of practice.

• Creative satisfaction: The sense of accomplishment from creating something entirely yourself may be diminished.

• Ethical and copyright issues: Questions remain about ownership and proper attribution of AI-assisted work.

Artists Leveraging AI

Mario Klingemann is an award-winning artist in residence at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris. He made headlines for his work (shown below) Memories of Passersby I, which generates portraits in real-time using neural networks. The piece is one of the first going up for auction in the traditional art market, making it a landmark in the history of AI Art. Notably, Klingemann says the art is not the images but the algorithm that creates them.

Swedish artist Annika Bäckström is known for her sugary sweet dreamscapes and pastel-coloured creations. “I’ve created things in all kinds of ways, and I consider AI to be yet another tool in my toolbox”, Bäckström says in this mini interview with Sandra Beijer. She continues: “Many people compare the rise of these tools to how the camera changed art. It was something completely new technologically, and democratised images in a way. Today, it's a given that we can take a picture of anything at any time.”

Dublin-born artist and graphic designer Robbie Barrat works with AI as a tool and a medium and has become a prominent figure in the art community. His career began at the leading computing company NVIDIA, and continued as a researcher at Stanford University. Recently, Swedish fashion house Acne Studios debuted their Fall Winter 2020 collection - which was produced in collaboration with Barrat.

“Robbie trained a neural network on the previous four seasons of Acne’s collections in order to create new designs, and he also produced imagery which was directly printed onto garments. Alongside this, he developed tools for the designers themselves to use, where they could click on an area of an outfit and alter or “correct” it somehow. The result is a series of garments which remix the notion of the collar, or the hemline, for example, simply because their concept was produced by an AI with no concept of what they should look like.” - Ruby Boddington

Until next time.
On behalf of Team Lumiera

Emma - Business Strategist
Allegra - Data Specialist
Sarah Bitamazire - Guest Author

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