AI & Human Creativity, A Path Forward?

Humans have long incorporated technology into our creativity. In the age of AI, this takes on new meaning. How can we do it?

Photo by Vitor Paladini on Unsplash

Sitting under the swaying palms at the edge of a silvery, sandy beach in 1962, anthropologist Margaret Mead, sitting with a group of Papua New Guinea artists, she was fascinated as she watched them painstakingly weave bits of aluminium from crashed World War II planes into their ceremonial masks. They didn’t see this modern technology as a threat, but rather as an evolution of their creative expression.

A Brooklyn based musician was recently noted as saying that “working with AI is like having a conversation with a peculiar collaborator who knows every song ever written, but has never felt heartbreak.”

We are in a period of tension today similar to those artists in Papua New Guinea and no doubt, other artisans throughout history who have faced working with new technologies. Much like how the Catholic Church looked down on the printing press for the creation of bibles. That was also about a loss of power, but that is an aspect of all new creative tools and materials.

When the telegraph began to see mass adoption around the world, some decried it would be the end of poetry as we know it. What largely defines this moment is the tension between vast troves of stored data, computational “knowledge” and our lived emotional experiences.

There is much bemoaning, rightly so, of what is being called AI “slop”, vast troves of AI generated content, regurgitations of all that has been written, with little emotional context to it. I call this beige content, emotionally colourless. Where human content is wrapped in the bright spark of human novelty.

Yet AI tools like Large Language Models (LLMs), which have the greatest impact on the written word and image generating tools like Gemini and DALLE-3 begin to question the meaning of visual art and their place in our world.

The aesthetic aspects of culture such as literature, fashion, art, music and architecture, are core to what it means to be human. Perhaps a reason that we remain fascinated by the ancient cave wall drawings and handprints of our ancestors? Who interestingly, used the technology of harnessed fire to create the original moving pictures on cave walls thousands of years ago? Rather than the Oscars maybe they had the Torchies?

The AI cat is out of the bag and it is running around the world like a cat with the zoomies after sniffing some catnip. That cat is not going back in the bag. So how we do we consider the way we will work with AI in the aesthetics of culture?

Much of our approach today when it comes to AI and human content (aesthetics) is oppositional thinking. It is AI vs human. We seek to place labels, which is a natural human reaction that goes back thousands of years, so this is not unusual. Anthropologist Claude Lévis-Strauss observed this binary relationship we have long held between nature and culture, which is reflected today in machine vs human.

Digital anthropologist Tom Boellstorff talks about “digital authenticity” or the idea that authenticity in digital spaces isn’t so much about the exclusion of new technologies, but rather the creation meaningful frameworks for understanding their role in cultural production. Synthesisers are not natural like guitars or a didgeridoo, yet in the 80’s they were foundational to pop music.

Perhaps the insight here is that the value isn’t so much in the technology, AI in this case, as it is in the emergence of specific cultural practices and the social relationships formed in our societies? AI may be a participant in the creative process, but AI cannot create the rich human context, that “aura” of what it means to be human. This in part comes from what anthropologist Lucy Suchhman calls “situated technology.”

AI tools or even the idea of AI agents that can do things for us, they cannot create culture in and of itself, for that is human only. AI may recognise patterns , but cannot generate emotional resonance or meaning-making like humans.

The value isn’t so much in the binary of humans vs AI, but more in how the collaboration serves our cultural needs. All we really have with humans and machines is a partial connection.

So rather than labelling and creating a divide, we instead think of how we indicate where and how AI is involved in the creative process. This in part may be done through documenting that process, much like Indigenous artists do to protect their creation from cultural exploitation. In some cases, labelling may be necessary. Cultural processes can and will, figure that out.

I did not write this article with AI, I never do. I have evolved my style and voice over years of writing public articles, academic papers and untold numbers of reports and research for my business clients. That’s part of my identity and I don’t want AI to write for me because it’s not my voice and my written “voice” seeps into reports, the news media interviews I do and the speaking engagements I deliver. But I do use AI for helping me with research and summarisations.

What we are evolving is at scale a sort of meshwork of the creative relationship between humans and machines, in this case, AI. As this relationship evolves we will have to move beyond the “dead zones” of binary thinking about human and AI creativity. The meshwork.

In many ways what we think is new to us as a species has some signal from our ancient past to help us navigate the new technologies we are merging into our cultures. The Andean cultures Quipo as the origin of blockchain and the artists of Papua New Guinea incorporated aluminium aeroplane parts into their face masks. Everything is a remix?