Miscellanea no 2: About Creativity

How would you define creativity? Or craftsmanship? How does AI influence the creativity process? Does an AI artefact have creativity?

These are questions that pop into mind these days. And I don’t have clear answers. When we talk about AI, I feel we don’t properly take the time to slow down, listen to the other side, and investigate. Reports show that “79% of the companies make use of generative AI in their everyday business functions.” Link 

How much is hype, and how much is actual use? Can you say that you use AI if you’re only using Google Gemini to summarise an email? Or to organise pieces of information that can be easily achieved with a bit of Python code?

Of course, we can’t forget about AI’s ecological, technological, societal and ethical costs and problems.

The whole discussion reminded me of this short podcast about one of Heidegger’s theories, which refers to “readiness to hand”.

Heidegger explains that we usually encounter things as tools for specific tasks—cooking, writing, building, creating. We connect most deeply with these tools not by studying them or analysing their properties, but by using them skilfully through sustained practice. This way of encountering equipment is what Heidegger calls readiness to hand.  

The next step is achieved when we stop thinking about the tools as simple, separate objects, and the tools become an extension of our intentions. This mastery is reached through repeated use, a lot of mistakes, struggle and refinement of the process.

And one doesn’t become only more efficient, but also develops what philosophers refer to as “embodied knowledge”.

Going back to AI, when you skip creation steps and go directly to the end result, you lose the meanings and complexities that can help you adapt. You will miss that embodied knowledge. It’s like when someone who never baked a cake starts believing that cakes are always bought from stores in their final form.

Here’s the link to the podcast

The community of Quilicura, Chile, created a chat experiment about the AI water consumption. Quilicura has the highest concentration of data centres dedicated to Artificial Intelligence in the region. Read more here

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BBC Creative has partnered with Nomint to create a stop-motion trailer, called “Trails will Blaze”, to highlight the broadcaster’s coverage of the Winter Olympic Games. They used 700 3D-printed miniature figures and 14 controlled combustion techniques to create flames and sparks.

Here's the trailer, and here’s a short behind-the-scenes.

Until next time.

Image: Still from Trails Will Blaze (Courtesy BBC/Nomint)