AI as Collaborator
9/30/24
Fascinating article about McNeal, a stage play about AI. My favorite quote is from the director of the play, Bartlett Sher:
Sher: I’ve thought a lot about this, trying to understand the issue of GPT and creativity, and I’m a lot less worried now, because I feel that the depth of the artistic process in the theater isn’t replicable.
The amalgam of human experience and emotion and feeling that passes through artists is uniquely human and not capturable. Word orders can be taken from all kinds of sources. They can be imitated; they can be replicated; they can be reproduced in different ways. But the essential activity of what we do here in this way, and what we build, has never been safer.
5/2024
I've been exploring ways in which AI can integrate with human creativity, extending my right brain into new associative depths as I write my next script, "On the Beach at Night."
Today, one of my muses is Sougwen Chung, "an internationally renowned artist and researcher exploring the boundaries of collaboration between human and machine." She investigates how the fallibility of human-machine interaction can extend the language of art – a concept that aligns perfectly with questions I am exploring.
AI is helping me discover things that extend my human imagination, rather than limiting it. Sometimes we have to dive into what we fear most. This is leading me to befriend the machine as a collaborator and not as Destroyer.
This morning I used a generative AI machine, "Claude 3", to create a list of paintings, poems, paintings, and song ideas associated with seven very specific motifs in my screenplay. I also asked it to find other artists using AI to extend their creative process.
Attention
I'm going to step out of that frame for a moment and say, what am I doing here? Who am I writing to?
The thing that's interesting me lately, well, a lot of things are, of course, but a big one is the fact that we are slowly, and in some cases, not so slowly, being robbed of our attention. And our attention is one of the most precious things we embody. My attention when I talk to you, when I touch you, when I listen to you.
Yet, we are living in a world of narcissism, of self-aggrandizement, of all of us wanting attention but none of us able to easily give it.
"[Attention] has been deliberately manipulated by market structures and technologies to the point that we are increasingly incapable of true attention. Our attention has never been more free, or more continuously entrapped. Our attentional environments are thus catastrophic. True attention is fundamentally endangered."
