The Sony World Photography Awards had an unusual winner in April 2023. Photographer Boris Eldagsen won it with a photo called “Pseudomnesia: The Electrician” which was fully AI-generated. This happened just a few months after artist Jason M. Allen won the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition in August 2022 with a painting called “Space Opera Theater” which he created using a text prompt on the generative AI tool Midjourney.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT art series, a collection of 10,000 apes drawn in a quirky way, reached a new milestone in January 2023 when a Bored Ape fetched 800 Ethereum cryptocurrency, equivalent to almost US$1 million. This happened at a time of a “crypto winter” or waning interest in cryptocurrencies and crypto art, and after the peak hype cycle of Bored Ape Yacht Club had passed.
The first is an example of Generative AI and the second is an example of Web3, but given the avalanche of technology news related to creative industries, it’s understandable if all of it blurs in our minds. It feels like we are living through an unprecedented era of technology in creativity and we’re often afraid of being left behind.
The intersection of technology and creativity: Embracing the power of human ingenuity
Amidst all this change, there’s one thing that has not changed. That’s the role of creativity in unleashing the power of all the tools available to us. As I discuss at length in my new book The Creative Human, the logic of Generative AI, Web3 and Data needs to be married with the magic of creativity.
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Let me bring this to life with an example of the creative use of data. A few years ago, Spotify leveraged its data to uncover unique anecdotes and used them as the basis for a series of billboards. Some of these billboards were, “Dear person who played ‘Sorry’ 42 times on Valentine’s Day, what did you do?”, “Be as loving as the person who put 48 Ed Sheeran songs on their ‘I Love Gingers’ playlist.”, “Exercise more conventionally than the 46 people who put ‘Slow Hands’ on their running playlists.”, and “To the person in NoLIta who started listening to holiday music way back in June, you really jingle all the way, huh?”
Just like data, AI offers creatives incredible new tools. Turkish artist Refik Anadol specialises in a creative medium he calls Machine Hallucinations. He feeds data of various forms into AI and lets it create trippy visualisations.
In May 2022, he placed sensors around the iconic Barcelona building Casa Batlló to pick up real-time environmental data and fed this into AI to create otherworldly machine hallucinations projected onto the building’s façade. This then became a dynamic NFT sold for a whopping US$1.38 million.
While technology was critical to both of these impressive works of creativity, they wouldn’t have been possible without human ingenuity.
As we take our creativity into the future, armed with exciting new tools, it’s vital to remember that these tools are great instruments for our orchestra, but the human brain continues to be the conductor of this orchestra.
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