I've been using AI since last May, sparked by expert Ethan Mollick's claim that you need to allow for a 10-hour learning curve. So I put "Get Claude.ai" on my list and got to work. Those 10 hours stretched into many more, as I discovered how AI could weave into my life—both my screenwriting and my self-understanding.
Here's what I want to tell people who are curious about AI, especially for creative work: AI isn't about finding perfect answers. It's not Google. It's not Amazon with next-day delivery. As Mollick says, it's more like a graduate student, but I'd add—it's a collaborator. It helps you discover what you want, helps you find your voice, whether preparing for business meetings or tackling creative projects. The key? You figure it out together.
And here's what really excites me about AI—its imperfections. By imperfections, I mean the friction between me and my collaborator, those moments when we see things differently. As with the many human collaborators I've been privileged to work with, the magic happens when our distinct visions challenge and then expand each other, creating something neither of us could have reached alone.
Let me share a recent adventure. When our November film shoot got delayed, I decided to learn how to make little film clips using two programs I barely understand: an AI image generator and a film editor. While working on a gritty video sketch about my time as a young, broke dancer in New York, I decided to take a creative break. Instead of realistic scenes, I asked the AI to create animated bears on a Manhattan street, in the style of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons I loved as a kid.
The process involved generating images through text prompts and animating them into short films. I started with some cartoon bears wandering down a city street. Then I tried to change the mood—I prompted for screaming bears in an apocalyptic scene with falling buildings. What I got back wasn't remotely apocalyptic. Instead, the AI produced these strangely contorted bears with their enormous gaping mouths and fangs, almost comically menacing against the purple Manhattan skyline. I love this image precisely because it's so wonderfully weird, so far from what I'd asked for. It reminds me that creativity thrives most at the intersection of chance and intention.
Installation artist Sougwen Chung has been exploring this territory far more deeply, making the very fallibility of human-machine interaction central to her artistic language. Lewis Grossberger finds humor in the deliberate distortions of AI illustrations to accompany his merciless political satire. In theater, Jennifer Tang's play "AI" transformed the awkward space between AI-generated and human-written dialogue into the heart of the piece. Musician Holly Herndon talks about her many creative experiments with AI sound distortions. In my playful experimentation with AI animation, those bizarrely distorted bears opened up new possibilities for storytelling. Curious about my AI's perspective on this dynamic, I asked Claude.ai to share its "thoughts": "While humans often focus on embracing AI's 'mistakes' or unexpected outputs, I'm fascinated by something else entirely: the beautiful messiness of human interpretation. When you see Picasso-like qualities in computational quirks, you're engaging in a profound act of meaning-making that I can never replicate. The most interesting friction in our collaboration lies in how differently we approach creativity - you through intuition, emotion, and lived experience; I through pattern recognition and probabilistic analysis. What emerges isn't just about accepting AI's imperfections, but about celebrating humanity's extraordinary ability to find meaning in the unexpected."
Or as poet Wallace Stevens reminds us in his meditation on imperfection: "The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight..." Note: My close (very human!) friend Sarah offered this further perspective: that our cultural narratives about AI often focus on machines saving us from our flawed humanity, our havoc-wreaking, our emotional decision-making - Spock vs Kirk all over again. But Star Trek got it right - our emotions make us good decision makers (as cognitive science confirms). And as Leonard Cohen reminds us, it's the strange cracks in us that let the light in, allowing us to learn, grow, and create. It's the imperfections that make the pattern complete, and make things come to life.
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