Mark d'Inverno – AI, creativity and all that jazz
”it’s a profoundly human act to give feedback to each other on our creative work”
Mark d’Inverno is not only a professor of computer science – he is also an accomplished jazz musician with both skill and feeling. His talk is more concerned with the latter: the craft of creative production. He believes the discourse has focussed too much on creativity as a power in the mind which leads to us trying to create computer systems which simulate ’heroic agency' where what matters is the final product. He believes that the modern understandings of creativity from psychology which lead to this way of designing and envisaging AI is a mistake. He subscribes instead to Dewey’s notion that art is not about the final piece itself but about the human experience of making and experiencing it. In his background as a teacher, d’Inverno works a lot with creative feedback – creating safe environments – physical and virtual - where feedback can be motivational and personalised. And he believes this is where AI can help. If we want to approach the world with the curiousity of a musician or artist, then rigorously designed AI can help us get a stronger sense of our shared world.
