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🔆 From Imagination to Existence: AI and creativity
Human-AI co-creativity, autonomous underwater vehicles, and big AI investments in Malaysia.
Emma G Moller, Allegra Guinan & Sarah Bitamazire
October 10, 2024
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🗞️ 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.
In this week's newsletter
What we’re talking about: The impact of AI tools like DALL-E, Midjourney and ChatGPT on human creativity and creative processes.
How it’s relevant: As AI becomes more sophisticated and widely used in creative fields, it's changing how people approach ideation, iteration, and production of creative works. This shift affects everyone from professional artists and designers to hobbyists and businesses utilising creative content.
Why it matters: Understanding the opportunities and challenges of AI in creativity is crucial for harnessing its potential while preserving human ingenuity and addressing ethical concerns. It impacts how we approach innovation, education, and even the definition of originality as technology increasingly augments human capabilities.
Big tech news of the week…
🌬️ Beam has deployed the world’s first AI-driven autonomous underwater vehicle for offshore wind farm inspections. This solution enables offshore workers to focus on more complex tasks, enhances inspection data quality, and enables 3D reconstructions of assets alongside visual data.
🥇The Nobel Peace Prize 2024 in Physics was awarded to researchers for advancing artificial neural network processes. Their work laid the foundation for the machine learning revolution that started around 2010.
🇲🇾 Oracle announced plans to invest more than US$6.5 billion to open a public cloud region in Malaysia, a significant step towards realising the country’s New Industrial Master Plan’s ambitious vision of creating 3,000 smart factories by 2030. Oracle’s decision highlights Malaysia’s growing position as a premier Southeast Asian destination for digital investments.
🎥 Last week, Meta announced Movie Gen. It demonstrates how you can use simple text inputs to produce custom videos and sounds, edit existing videos, and transform an image into a unique video. The unprecedented ease and flexibility of Movie Gen’s features could transform the landscape of digital media creation. See our previous edition on deepfakes to learn more about the risks of these advancements.
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.