Reading Response #9

to Artful Design • Response: “Humans in the Loop” + “Experimental Creative Writing” 

Vic 

12/4/2022

Music 256A / CS476a, Stanford University

Reading Response: 

In the article and video that was assigned, we looked at the possible uses of AI in creative endeavors and considered how it potentially could be used, and discussed whether or not its use could be a good or bad thing. In the article idea of humans in the loop is such an interesting idea to consider. I agree that many times people consider AI to be a solution that creates things with potentially little to no insight into how it got made the way that it was or why. While I think this can be interesting and can provide some meaning with its use depending on the context, it does not measure up to the intentional work that humans do when creating pieces of art. I think that the humans-in-the-loop idea is a great alternative to the big red-button train of thought. By creating an AI program to serve as a tool for an artist instead of a machine to create artwork itself, it puts the human back into the project. I think as we have discussed previously in this course and as has been mentioned in the textbook Artful Design, as well as in this article itself, it is important to create meaningfully. I feel that using AI to help with the parts of the task that tend to be tedious actually enhances the artwork. This can contribute to allowing the artist to work in a state of flow, rather than losing momentum with overly complicated or impossibly large tasks. 

For example, trying to get rid of a small technical mistake in a photo, for example, could be a painstaking task that prevents momentum for the project's original idea. But creating an ai that can easily remove that mistake and do it the way you intend saves time! AI is also powerful and can help do the tasks that you could do but would take hours to complete, such as analyzing texts from books and putting them in different styles, such as the way the video showed with the example of rewriting a paragraph from a well-known novel more and more incrementally into the stylings of a biblical text. 

This also can mean that you can use an AI for its own ‘advise’. You could use an AI to get an idea or a template to work off of and then use it from that point on to create the idea you form based on its creation. In that sense, you are doing a project with AI while also still creating something human. The article specifically mentions using AI as a back-and-forth conversation. So building something, you make adjustments or give slightly different instructions then have the AI work on it again. 

There is something disappointing and soothing about the idea of AI not being able to create human art. On the one hand, it's a loss of possible human achievement, however odd that achievement may be. But it's also comforting to know that humanity can not be replaced and that we are valuable and possess more than our thinking. To know that we are so complex that we can’t be perfectly replicated and that the things we do even if they feel small to use are always significant because they can’t be completely recreated.