Tag Archives: creativity

AI and the Human Factor

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Earlier this month, I went to the Melbourne premiere of “Eno”, a documentary by Gary Hustwit, which is described as the world’s first generative feature film. Each time the film is shown, the choice and sequencing of scenes is different – no two versions are ever the same. Some content may never be screened at all.

I’ll leave readers to explore the director’s rationale for this approach (and the implications for film-making, cinema and streaming). But during a Q&A following the screening, Hustwit was at pains to explain that this is NOT a film generated by AI. He was also guarded and refrained from revealing too much about the proprietary software and hardware system he co-developed to compile and present the film.

However, the director did want to stress that he didn’t simply tell an AI bot to scour the internet, scrape any content by, about or featuring Brian Eno, and then assemble it into a compilation of clips. This documentary is presented according to a series of rules-based algorithms, and is a content-led venture curated by its creator. Yes, he had to review hours and hours of archive footage from which to draw key themes, but he also had to shoot new interview footage of Eno, that would help to frame the context and support the narrative, while avoiding a banal biopic or series of talking heads. The result is a skillful balance between linear story telling, intriguing juxtaposition, traditional interviews, critical analysis, and deep exploration of the subject. The point is, for all its powerful capabilities, AI could not have created this film. It needed to start with human elements: innate curiosity on the part of the director; intelligent and empathetic interaction between film maker and subject; and expert judgement in editing the content – as a well as an element of risk-taking in allowing the algorithm to make the final choices when it comes to each screened version.

That the subject of this documentary is Eno should not be surprising, either. He has a reputation for being a modern polymath, interested in science and technology as well as art. His use of Oblique Strategies in his creative work, his fascination with systems, his development of generative music, and his adoption of technology all point to someone who resists categorisation, and for whom work is play (and vice versa). In fact, imagination and play are the two key activities that define what it is to be human, as Eno explored in an essay for the BBC a few years ago. Again, AI does not yet have the power of imagination (and probably has no sense of play).

Sure, AI can conjure up all sorts of text, images, video, sound, music and other outputs. But in truth, it can only regurgitate what it has been trained on, even when extrapolating from data with which it has been supplied, and the human prompts it is given. This process of creation is more akin to plagiarism – taking source materials created by other people, blending and configuring them into some sort of “new” artefact, and passing the results off as the AI’s own work.

Plagiarism is neither new, nor is it exclusive to AI, of course. In fact, it’s a very natural human response to our environment: we all copy and transform images and sounds around us, as a form of tribute, hommage, mimicry, creative engagement, pastiche, parody, satire, criticism, acknowledgement or denouncement. Leaving aside issues of attribution, permitted use, fair comment, IP rights, (mis)appropriation and deep fakes, some would argue that it is inevitable (and even a duty) for artists and creatives to “steal” ideas from their sources of inspiration. Notably, Robert Shore in his book about “originality”. The music industry is especially adept at all forms of “copying” – sampling, interpolation, remixes, mash-ups, cover versions – something that AI has been capable of for many years. See for example this (limited) app from Google released a few years ago. Whether the results could be regarded as the works of J.S.Bach or the creation of Google’s algorithm trained on Bach’s music would be a question for Bach scholars, musicologists, IP lawyers and software analysts.

Finally, for the last word on AI and the human condition, I refer you to the closing scene from John Carpenter’s cult SciFi film, “Dark Star”, where an “intelligent” bomb outsmarts its human interlocutor. Enjoy!

Next week: AI hallucinations and the law

 

 

The Law of Diminishing Returns….

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After blogging about false economies last week, a similar topic came to mind – the law of diminishing returns. This is the principle that suggests the longer you keep doing the same thing, the less benefit you derive from it.

I know from personal experience that continuing to work at something for any length of time can lead to a decline in results – fatigue sets in, I’m more prone to making mistakes, and I end up spending more time double-checking and correcting my work. So, in way, it’s another false economy – spending more hours on a task (the input) does not justify the amount of effort, or guarantee the quality of the end results (the output). Part of it is down to efficiencies, but it’s also to do with losing focus, being distracted, or being so intent on the “doing” and not the “achieving”.

Politicians, writers, musicians, artists, athletes are all susceptible to the law of diminishing returns. Doggedly repeating the same old slogans in pursuit of the same old policies (or trying to hold on to power for its own sake) lead political parties into stagnation and electoral dead ends. Successful athletes who don’t know when to hang up their boots rarely get to choose the timing of their retirement. Creatives who keep recording the “same” album, writing the “same” novel, making the “same” film, or painting the “same” picture come across as stale, formulaic, tired, boring and bereft of ideas – it’s clear that they have nothing new to say, so why should we keep paying attention?

Next week: Whose side is AI on?

 

 

Sakamoto – Coda and Muzak

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Contemporary music documentaries tend to fall into one of two categories: the track-by-track “making of” account, in support of a new album; and the “behind the scenes” artifact of a live concert tour (often in support of that new album).* Both can be fine in their own way, but ultimately they are there to plug product. The recent documentary “Coda”, featuring Ryuichi Sakamoto clearly bucks that trend.As a recording artist, Sakamoto is one of the most prolific composers of his era. As a performer, he has maintained a regular schedule of live concerts and collaborations. That is until he was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, and was forced to temporarily abandon his work. Fortunately, he has come through that recent health scare, even completing a major film score for “The Revenant” before he had fully recovered.

“Coda” started out as an account of Sakamoto’s anti-nuclear activism, but ended up providing an insight into his creative process, an examination of the role of sound and music in film, and a discourse on the aesthetics of minimalism.

There are two images in the film which provide a link between the “craft” of the composer and the “art” inherent in any form of creativity. The first is a close-up of Sakamoto’s working tools – the pencils he uses to write out his scores. The second is a shot of some immaculate cooking utensils – arranged in a similar fashion to his perfectly sharpened pencils. This is someone for whom both process and form serve the purpose of creativity, and which combine to determine the artistic outcome of the resulting content.

As a regular soundtrack composer, Sakamoto has been likened to a film-maker, although he is neither director nor cinematographer. He has an acute sense of the use of sound (not just music) in film, and in fact for his most recent album, “Async”, Sakamoto invited film-makers to submit short films to accompanying each of the tracks. An astounding 675 films were considered for the competition.

Ever sensitive to his environment, it was perhaps no surprise that Sakamoto chose to change the music played at one of his favourite restaurants, rather than eat elsewhere. And ever the non-egoist, none of the tracks on his restaurant playlist was his own.

The forthcoming performance by Sakamoto and long-time collaborator Alva Noto at the Melbourne International Arts Festival promises to be something special.

Next week: Revolving Doors At The Lodge

* An honourable exception in recent years was “The Go-Betweens: Right Here”

Why it’s important to make time for play

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Do we spend enough time playing? As adults, have we forgotten how to play? Have we in fact been conditioned to stop playing once we “grow up”?

Bigshot Front View

Most of us would probably recognise that a lack of play during our childhood can have serious consequences for our psychological development. Dr. Stuart Brown of the National Institute for Play makes the case that a lack of adult play has a negative impact both on our energy levels and on our mental well-being. Again, most people would appreciate that taking time out from our daily tasks and routine can lift our spirits and put us in a better frame of mind – it can also help us with problem-solving and creative thinking – but few of us make a conscious effort to schedule some dedicated and regular play activity into our day. (And I don’t mean simply spending an hour or two playing computer games.)

How we play is just as important as what we play with, and the type of play activity that engages us – in short, we are what we play. So the absence of any play may suggest something is missing in our lives.

When I was a child, some of my favourite toys enabled me to design and build things, to construct working models with clockwork and electric motors, to assemble, disassemble and re-assemble simple electronic circuits for radios, light-operated switches and walkie-talkies. I even built a rudimentary synthesizer using parts stripped from an old TV set, and a keyboard made from an ice cream tin. OK, so I wasn’t going to get a gig with Kraftwerk, but I did learn about capacitors, resistors, transistors, diodes, rheostats, transformers and relays, even if I couldn’t get a recognizable tune out of the instrument itself.

This avid curiosity about how things work once caused me to take apart a clockwork motor, which I was then unable to get to work again. My father, an engineer, simply said, “Never take something apart unless you know how to put it back together”, sage advice which is helpful even today in my role as a strategist, executive coach and business consultant.

I would suggest that there is a link between abandoning play in adulthood and a growing lack of curiosity about how things actually work once we get older, coupled with our increasing passivity towards new technology. For example, how many of us would know (or care) how to repair simple mechanical or electrical appliances in our homes?

While there has been an understandable effort aimed at encouraging children to learn how to write code, this emphasis on software comes at the expense of learning how machines work, how hardware is designed, how electronic and mechanical components combine together. This software bias has prompted a team of educationalists to launch the Bigshot digital camera kit designed to help children learn through play by making a real digital camera, and to understand the relationship between software and hardware. Others are teaching summer schools that combine software programming with engineering and robotics – but the broader goal is to develop problem-solving, logic, comprehension and reasoning skills.

Our pursuit of creative or constructive play in adulthood is not helped by the obsession designers and manufacturers have with producing “sealed units” – hardware that comes with “no user serviceable parts inside”*.  Even if we succeeded in taking the back off a gadget and having a look inside, it would probably invalidate the warranty and extinguish our consumer protection rights.

If we don’t understand how the things we use are designed to work, how can we tell if something is wrong, how can we learn to improve them, how can we find new ways of using them?

Smart companies and organizations understand the importance of learning through play and actively encourage their people to spend time “playing” – either through the pursuit of pet projects, or through creative, collaborative and social activities designed to instil innovation and fresh thinking.

As such, I’m very interested to hear from organizations that incorporate “play” into their regular activities, to understand why and how they do it, and to learn about the outcomes and benefits it delivers. I can be contacted via this blog, LinkedIn or Twitter.

*Note: Software is often just as bad with so-called “default” settings that get in the way of our ability to play around with and explore the programs we use.