Seeing AI as a collaborator, not a creator

The explanation you’re studying this letter from me in the present day is that I used to be bored 30 years in the past. 

I used to be bored and curious in regards to the world and so I wound up spending loads of time within the college pc lab, screwing round on Usenet and the early World Large Net, on the lookout for attention-grabbing issues to learn. Quickly sufficient I wasn’t content material to only learn stuff on the web—I needed to make it. So I realized HTML and made a fundamental internet web page, after which a greater internet web page, after which an entire web site stuffed with internet issues. After which I simply saved going from there. That amateurish assortment of internet pages led to a journalism internship with the net arm of {a magazine} that paid little consideration to what we geeks have been doing on the internet. And that led to my first actual journalism job, after which one other, and, nicely, ultimately this journalism job. 

However none of that will have been doable if I hadn’t been bored and curious. And extra to the purpose: interested in tech. 

The college pc lab could appear at first like an unlikely middle for creativity. We have a tendency to think about creativity as taking place extra within the artist’s studio or writers’ workshop. However all through historical past, fairly often our best artistic leaps—and I might argue that the net and its descendants symbolize one such leap—have been as a consequence of advances in know-how. 

There are the massive simple examples, like images or the printing press, but it surely’s additionally true of all kinds of artistic innovations that we regularly take without any consideration. Oil paints. Theaters. Musical scores. Electrical synthesizers! Virtually anyplace you look within the arts, maybe exterior of pure vocalization, know-how has performed a task.  

However the important thing to inventive achievement has by no means been the know-how itself. It has been the best way artists have utilized it to specific our humanity. Consider the best way we discuss in regards to the arts. We regularly praise it with phrases that discuss with our humanity, like soul, coronary heart, and life; we regularly criticize it with descriptors reminiscent of sterile, scientific, or lifeless. (And positive, you’ll be able to love a sterile piece of artwork, however sometimes that’s as a result of the artist has leaned into sterility to make a degree about humanity!)

All of which is to say I believe that AI will be, might be, and already is a device for artistic expression, however that true artwork will all the time be one thing steered by human creativity, not machines. 

I could possibly be flawed. I hope not. 

This problem, which was solely produced by human beings utilizing computer systems, explores creativity and the strain between the artist and know-how. You’ll be able to see it on our cowl illustrated by Tom Humberstone, and examine it in tales from James O’Donnell, Will Douglas Heaven, Rebecca Ackermann, Michelle Kim, Bryan Gardiner, and Allison Arieff. 

But in fact, creativity is about extra than simply the humanities. All of human development stems from creativity, as a result of creativity is how we remedy issues. So it was essential to us to deliver you accounts of that as nicely. You’ll discover these in tales from Carrie Klein, Carly Kay, Matthew Ponsford, and Robin George Andrews. (In the event you’ve ever needed to understand how we would nuke an asteroid, that is the problem for you!)  

We’re additionally attempting to get somewhat extra artistic ourselves. Over the subsequent few points, you’ll discover some modifications coming to this journal with the addition of some new common gadgets (see Caiwei Chen’s “3 Things” for one such instance). Amongst these modifications, we’re planning to solicit and publish extra common reader suggestions and reply questions you’ll have about know-how. We invite you to get artistic and electronic mail us: newsroom@technologyreview.com.

As all the time, thanks for studying.

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