How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love A.I.

This is a raw idea I have for uses of Artificial Intelligence. We can already see good results coming from computer-assisted creativity. Given a few inputs, the computer can generate a ton of useful iterations.

AI Graph

One of the things I’m excited about is when we start plugging in these generative systems end to end. Like a big creative AI graph.

Imagine you have an AI program that will take hand sketches and turn them into cats. Then you have another AI program that can take a video of you dancing and picture of a cat, then make the cat dance. Then plug that video into another AI that turns it into a controllable puppet in a video game.

Messy Fun

The doom and gloom around AI focus on what is a commodity today. Not how all the AI we have in the future will interact as a superset of tools and ideas. There will be no “one AI to rule them all” soon (sorry Kurzweil). A nice middle stage is going to happen where we do what humans do best, make a huge mess.

Loop that line

Sure, I’ll be able to use Creative Cloud to sample your voice and make you say things you didn’t. I can also use Creative Cloud to sample your voice and make you say things you didn’t, but should have! Maybe you forgot to say a line, or missed a page.

Making a film is going to be easier. Just train the voice model on the scene you shot, then type in the looped line. Or how about localizing (or sanitizing) the dialogue for certain release demographics. No swearing for the mainland and full of swearing for the coastlines.

Perfectionist will be the most impacted by AI

The biggest threat of all is going to be perfectionism! Endless tweaking combined with high fidelity results is going to make for a tweakers paradise.

Don’t fall into it. Don’t be the Orson Welles of AI-assisted art creation. Maintain an attitude of easy come, easy go. After all, you’re just making the input for someone else’s AI. Just pump it out.

It’s going to be hard for artists. The world isn’t going to need “you” necessarily. It’s going to need your data. That means a huge shift in what artists do. Instead of training forever to get good at one thing. Being OK at a lot of things is going to allow you to generate a lot of different types of data. Artists will have to pick to go to the deep end on their personal style, or leverage AI to do a lot of different things. The answer isn’t simple.

Stop all this pointless worrying!

At this point, I have more ideas for creative uses of AI than I do apocalyptic scenarios. When a robot does finally show up at the bar demanding my clothes, my boots and my motorcycle… I’ll be reasonably sure that it’s going to make those things better somehow. It probably doesn’t need them to hunt down future resistance leaders.

What creative interactions of AI are you most excited for? And don’t tell me it’s project management or self-driving cars. Zzzzzz!

We know computers can do boring stuff. I think it’s important that they keep on doing boring stuff.

Come up with some cool ideas to plug into the AI Graph, or better yet… Get AI to do it.

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Matthew Willox

Artist masquerading as a developer in a designers world.

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