Creativity Cannot Be Computed

Computers are great. But should we put them in charge of creativity? Can they push boundaries, take moral stances, move audiences or turn personal experiences into works of art that resonate? In his talk, Hidde will make the case for making and enjoying art, in all its shapes and forms. We'll explore what makes art special, to understand better what it means to delegate its creation to computers.

Transcription

(Music Playing) (Applause)

Thank you, Marc. I’m glad I’m not the thing between you and this, because you’ve already had one. My mission is going to be not to throw that one over the floor and spill it.

Excited to be here today and to close off this event. I’ve had a really good time. Have you as well? Have you enjoyed this?

(Applause)

It’s been so cool to see all that creativity over two days. I came up with this talk title, Creativity Cannot Be Computed. And I feel like it’s kind of already proven over the past two days. We’ve seen so much creativity.

We’ve also seen a bit of computing. And it’s what I really like about this event and kind of why I thought it would fit with Marc’s event in particular, because he always tries to combine creativity and technology. And I think that’s really important. We’ve got silos sometimes. And kind of over the past two days, I think we’ve seen these silos shrink, at least at this event.

I love creativity. I’ve never had it in my job title.

But I guess I nearly did it once. But I think it’s up to anyone, really, to be creative in their work, to kind of find that creative spark, whatever you’re worked on.

Now, as almost everyone has in this event, I’ll also talk a bit about my childhood, a bit last minute. But I used to be a restaurant critic.

So I’d gone out and tested all these different restaurants.

Then I kind of pivoted my career and went into gardening, my own gardening company.

After that, I guess I went into university. I studied cognitive artificial intelligence and then moved over to philosophy, because I found it even more interesting.

And I’m sorry.

This talk is going to be a bit philosophical. It’s going to have some philosophy inside of it. Going to have a critical look at creativity.

So I’m going to say that creativity cannot be computed. But I do want to say that I love computers. That is the one statement I want you to not forget. Computers are awesome. I’ve got one in my hand right now, and it’s proving very useful. Almost every moment throughout the day, I navigate through this venue with it. And I take pictures of loved ones that keep in touch with people. Of course, they’re awesome. I think we all know that. But we also tend to overestimate the power of computers all the time. We tend to overestimate how fast progress goes.

Now, as a man said, a man who needs no introduction,

who’s hubris leaves no introduction, Elon Musk, he said that you could take a Hyperloop from one city to another in the US. He said that in 2013, a long time ago. And he said it would take him three to four years to build this Hyperloop. And then he added within the interview that if it was his top priority, you could probably get it done in one or two years.

Now, this is kind of how a lot of people in technology pitch their technologies. They’ll say, we’ll get it done very quickly, and it will be done, and it will be amazing. But we really tend to overestimate how good our computers are. While at the same time underestimating how important creative work is, like if Mark Zuckerberg, he was asked why he didn’t pay creators more. And then he said that creators overestimate the value of their own work.

It says something about how a CEO of one of our biggest tech companies thinks about technology, but also about creativity. They clearly think that creativity is less important. They think it can be solved quickly.

Creativity has been easier for AI than people thought, since Sam Altman of OpenAI last year at a tech conference.

And I wondered, what do you mean, Sam? What is easy exactly with AI? And he went on and said, you can see that DALI generates amazing images while writing creative stories with GPT-4.

I don’t know what-- whatever. It’s weird to see him say that, because I don’t feel that when I see these AI-generated images of AI all over my LinkedIn feed. I see a different type of creativity.

And I think we need to establish that this is a man whose company makes tools that do that kind of stuff. And he’s marketing those tools. And I think that’s fine. That’s really just right. But it doesn’t mean we need to accept that definition of creativity. So in this talk, we’re going to look at what creativity is. But first, I want to talk a bit about what computing is.

And computing is actually really old. Computing is about manipulating numbers, which they did 2,000 years before Christ. They found clay tablets in Babylonia, which is where currently Iraq and the bits of Iran and Syria are. And they were doing geometry on these clay tablets.

They were also doing something that resembled, to me, like an Excel sheet.

I think it’s calculating triangular stuff. There’s a Wikipedia page on it. And it explains it. I didn’t understand it. But they were doing mathematics. They were manipulating numbers, doing the computing. And for a very long time, computers were actual people who were doing calculations.

And there were always people, usually guys, that went like, we should automate this. We should make this easier. We went into manipulating data and completing tasks automatically.

But for me, computing these days also kind of means throwing technology at something. And we’re really good at that. We usually think that technology is going to solve all of our problems.

And yeah, there’s a long history of that. I’ll show you a few examples.

Charles Babbage, in the 19th century, he was the person who came up with a machine that was called the difference engine. And this engine was meant to do calculation automatically. Very useful. People used to do it by hand. And you wanted to develop a machine that could automate it. Great pursuit. It was mostly existent in the form of descriptions and essays and stuff.

And not so much as an actual machine. It’s kind of working on it, but it was more of a conceptual thing. So what you see here is what scientists built later based on the descriptions that were there. There was also the analytical machine that he came up a few years later. And that one could also store stuff. And as everyone who’s written programs knows, this means you could do programming. If you can store information, you can program. So the kind of first program started to happen there. Some of this was thanks to a woman he met, Ada Lathles. She was very young at the time. She was 17 years old. And she got to meet Charles Babbage through, I think, to her parents.

And it was amazing because she kind of looked at all this stuff. And at some point, she was tasked with translating an article about these machines. And they had talked about it a lot. So she didn’t just translate the article from Italian to English, but she also added a lot of notes.

So she put these machines into context and explains the capabilities of what things they could do. In a sense, it was kind of like an OG dev rel at the time. She put it in context and she added, how do we actually use this stuff? And one of her notes actually contains what resembles an algorithm. So you could call it an invention of the algorithm in which she explains how you can use punch cards to do calculations on this machine. So pretty cool. But what I liked even more in these notes is that she also reflects on the power of machinery.

She said it is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the analytical engine.

She basically said we shouldn’t get too excited. Yes, this is a cool machine. Yes, it can do stuff. But also, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’s a good warning that we should keep in mind when we do modern day technology.

And then Alan Turing came many years later. He wrote a paper called On Computing Machines in which he talked about whether we could have one algorithm or one kind of system that could find out about any mathematical statement, whether it’s true or false. This was a problem that mathematicians had dealt with for a very long time. And one mathematician said, we could do that. We could have one machine to rule them all. And in this paper, he explained that that is not the case. We need lots of different algorithms. Again, this was really influential in the history of computer science. I’m probably reflecting it somewhat badly because it’s a while ago since I actually looked at the subject matter.

But this was really influential. He came up with the concept of Turing machines here. If you want to know more about this, Turing’s vision is a really cool book that goes into all the nerdy details. Or there is the Hollywood-ified version of that, the imitation game, also an interesting film to look at. Now a few years after that, a bunch of scientists decided to get together in Dartmouth in the US, initiated by John McCarthy, who is known as the father of AI.

And he found out or coined this term when he made this letter. So he wrote a proposal on artificial intelligence. He decided that 10 men should come together and work on the problem of artificial intelligence. It was only men at the time that did these kind of things apparently.

And it is a bit like the proposal for cascading style sheets. It didn’t contain cascading style sheets yet. This is about artificial intelligence, just coined the term. And they got together, they decided to get stuff done together. They had seven problems they wanted to work on. Many of those are still problems that people work on in artificial intelligence. The seventh was creativity, by the way. Really interesting.

Many, many years later, in 2006, he actually said AI was harder than we thought. And this is a kind of common theme within this history of computer science. We’ve always thought, like, we’ll solve this within a few years, whether that’s flying cars or self-driving cars and all these kinds of things. You can find it all the time. We overestimate our own abilities.

So we got the first algorithm. We got the Turing machine concept. At that point, people started inventing lots of really interesting stuff, like the first programming language and compilers. Grace Hopper did that. Someone named Karen Spark Jones invented inverse document frequency, which is used in search engines.

Then we got the first robotic vacuum cleaner. Very useful. The first very useful tool in programming. And then we got iPhones, and we got all sorts of cool things. And now we’ve reached the year 2024, where AI is going to fix all of our problems.

And I think if we reflect on it, it can do lots of useful things. I’ve seen people do very useful things with it.

But also, we need to keep a lot of lovelies in mind and think about the possibility of exaggerated ideas. We might be getting ahead of ourselves when we claim that AI is going to solve all of our problems. It’s unlikely that anything is going to solve all of our problems. AI isn’t going to do that either.

So let’s talk about creativity then. So we are going to need your help later with this. So creativity is basically problem solving, and it can be in things like designing actual robots. Or technical migrations, they require lots of creativity, as Sophie talked about. Inventing sell sheet languages? Yeah, you’ve got to be very creative for that. And be very careful with what sort of things you put in and don’t put in. Picture books need lots of creativity. There are lots of things where we use creativity in our daily lives. And it’s always about coming up with new ideas, innovative ideas, interesting new use cases that nobody else has thought of, and solving different problems in different ways.

But for me, creativity is also about the absence of dullness. If there is no creativity in the world, the world would be super boring. So that is a state that we don’t want to get in. So I want to show you a few examples of where I think things got really creative, like this one. And I hope we can start that in maybe three, two, one. (Upbeat Music)

(Upbeat Music)

So it’s what I can best describe as a love song for someone named Manon by the Dutch hip-hop formation, the Jogfontejkorde. I want to start as I was amazed like how this is possible to create letters out of cat playhouses, but super cool. Creativity is lots of things. Like we’ve seen lots of creativity in the talks in the past few days. It’s creating fancy lettering instead of normal lettering. There are lots of definitions of creativity also in like the history of philosophy. Like Emmanuel Clanton said that it is the ability to produce works that are not only original

because they could be original nonsense, but they’re also exemplary. So we want to have stuff that is super interesting as well.

My word, Bowdoin came up with three different types of creativity, combinational, exploratory, and transformational.

Combinational, you won’t be surprised. Basically combining two different ideas into something super novel.

I wonder if you’ve ever tried espresso tonics. If you haven’t, I would recommend it. It’s a weird combination, but the first person who tried it can be very proud of themselves. They’re nice.

Exploratory creativity then is basically when you try and find the boundaries of what’s creative. So jazz music is an example of that. Musicians get together, they get some kind of brief, but they also try and excite each other and challenge each other with different things that they’re trying out and they go across boundaries.

Transformational is when something is completely new and it kind of changes the world and it becomes something that’s part of the history of art, or in this case of technology, the steam engine. Or Quincy Jones, who died this week and had a huge impact on pop music and basically any kind of modern music that he got involved with, like Michael Jackson’s music. So that kind of creativity is really transformational. And when we’re talking about creativity, it’s really related to lots of other things. It’s related to design, art, and aesthetics. So where creativity is basically is something new or interesting, design is more about how does it function? Does it meet the brief? Does it do the functional thing that it needs to do?

Aesthetics is about, is this beautiful? And also, what am I feeling? It’s like when you go to a dentist or get an operation, they give you anesthetics, you feel nothing. Aesthetics is the opposite of that, right? You feel stuff.

And then art. Art’s really hard to define and we’re gonna spend a little bit of time on that because I think one of the most interesting things that you can do with creativity is to come up with art.

And art is not to be confused with entertainment.

At least some people say so, right? At some point, when it’s not an art with a capital A, people say, nah, that’s entertainment, doesn’t count. I wanna be quite generous in my definition of art. I think it’s pretty much everything that you could put under that umbrella, from films to books to like sculpture, performances, plays, opera, social media posts, probably not, but like literature. There’s lots of stuff that counts as art. And art is really hard to define. It’s not always easy to recognize either.

In this elevator in a museum in Lissa in the Netherlands, they had an artwork that got destroyed by a cleaner. And they didn’t understand that it was art.

Here’s what it looked like. It’s called “All the Good Times We Spend Together” by Alexander Lefat. And it’s basically a can of beer.

And the museum explained that, you know, they wanted to challenge people in their ways of looking and they had this whole thing in their PR release. But yeah, people didn’t understand, at least the cleaners did not. And there’s lots of art like that, where it’s really hard to know whether it’s art or not.

Famously, Marcel Duchamp, he went to a store and purchased a urinal and then wrote a name on it, not his own, and then submitted it to the Society of Independent Artists in New York.

And then that was a piece of art. So it was there for people to look at. Again, it’s really hard to recognize it’s art. And at some point it became art because the people who made it in the factory,

they didn’t know they were making art, but it became art because he decided that it would be.

There’s also this weird floor that a Dutch artist made. It’s called the peanut butter platform. And it is basically a rectangular shape when it’s prepped peanut butter onto the floor. It smells terrible, as you can imagine.

And it was purchased by a museum in Rotterdam. And what they basically purchased was a set of instructions, like how do you apply the peanut butter and how much of it.

The artist doesn’t even need to be present for it to be executed or like to be performed somewhere.

But they did pay a lot of money for acquiring this work.

Art is also legitimized. That’s something that is really interesting about art. There are different ways where that works. Sometimes an artist will put it out as art, like Marshall de Chantet is declared a thing art. Sometimes the audience wants to pay for it. They’ll put some money in and now it’s suddenly art or institutions want to display it. That’s usually what happens. They curate it, they put it into their collection. And then if it’s a famous museum or it’s famous art historians deciding it, it suddenly becomes art. But this isn’t somewhat fuzzy process. There’s not like an application procedure that you can just go, I want this thing to become art.

What also makes art somewhat hard to define is that it’s got critics and kind of how that criticizing works. Like people will say like, oh, that’s well executed. Or they will say there’s really good ideas in this or as captivated by it. Sometimes they’ll say it’s really original or it’s not. It’s full of cliches, it’s stunning. Lots of different ways of describing and critics are usually people who work like for a newspaper or like actually go out to review the work, but it could be anyone.

In fact, anyone kind of appreciates art on different levels. And that’s another reason why art is so hard to define is that it depends on who you are and kind of what your background is and how kind of you understand life, how you can appreciate art. When I was a 12-year-old, I really liked pop music, but I didn’t really know the English language, so I hadn’t really learned that yet. So I was a big fan of this song called “The Bad Touch” by the Bloodhound Gang.

And when they were thinking you and me maybe ate nothing but mammals, I didn’t know what that meant and I certainly didn’t know what it would mean to do it like they do on a Discovery Channel. Didn’t know what the Discovery Channel was. I don’t know if we had it. So it depends if you know the language, if you can actually appreciate the art. The way that I appreciated this is that I understand that I like this tune. I guess I like to dance to it or something, but I didn’t know what the maybe deeper meaning to the song was. And there’s lots of things that kind of change how you appreciate art. It could be that you have personal experiences, it could be that you know stuff about the context of this art in the history. Maybe you know a lot about the artist or you’ve read the description in the museum, or you might know the language that it is made in. So appreciation is really like a continuum. You could have no context, you could have lots of context. And that’s all valid, right? You can go into a museum and have zero context and still be moved by pieces of art. Appreciation is really a continuum. So it really depends like how much of it you would understand.

And you know, that’s the case too. And I’m not sure what I was supposed to say with this.

Oh yeah, so Paddy told me actually when he was working on these books, is that he always puts different layers in his art. So for the parents versus for the children. And I think that’s another interesting thing about the appreciation of say a children’s book. The child appreciates different from the parents and there’s different levels to that. So it’s never kind of one thing and somehow art is appreciated.

Art is also repeated.

It gets repeated all the time. It could be the same work, right? You could have a children’s book that is turned into a film, that’s then turned into a remake and then into a musical and then into a remake of that musical.

This happens. And the weird thing about that is is that you kind of have the work of art, like the story and like the same people are in that. Like Charlie is always there, but it’s played by different people. It could be in a different country. It could be written by someone else. Like the script would be adapted for some place or time. And maybe if they did it in the eighties, it would be different than if they did it today. They might put some references into the base society. So art can change and also stay the same. And the same happens with like operas. They’re performing in different places, different times, different people. And the same happens with music as well. In music, people cover each other quite a lot. So the song “S.O.S.” by Abba, which isn’t an extremely happy song. Like if you look at the lyrics, it was turned into a really sad and grim version by the British band Portishead for a film called “Highrise.” Now that version is very different, but it is also still the same song and it’s got the same lyrics, for instance, but the vibe is very different.

Another way that art gets repeated is by people painting the same paintings. My daughter is in this art class for kids. And what they do is they get shown an artwork and they talk about it with all the kids and then they make interpretations of that art. And it’s so interesting. This is David Hockley’s painting and it’s called “Portent of an Artist.” And you see someone swimming in the water, see some interesting reflections in that. And their teacher just takes them and has them make these different reflections

and they make their own interpretation of the people. And what I always find mesmerizing is that you actually recognize the work when you look at all their different versions, they’re all very different, like they do different stuff, but they’re also very similar at the same time. That’s really unique to art, then it gets repeated.

The art of conference organizing, I guess, also gets repeated. Marc does this event in Dusseldorf and he does it in Berlin. You get a similar vibe. He still got Marc, he got Toby,

but it’s also quite a different event too. So it gets repeated and it’s kind of changing the meaning but also keeping the meaning at the same time. Really interesting about art and it makes it so hard to define. And sometimes it contains intentions as well. People put their intention into art and the way to find out what those intentions are is sometimes to listen to interviews with the artists.

But you can’t always know, you can’t always know what people are thinking. Like there’s someone on Instagram, a three-year-old child who makes these paintings, but because of his age, it’s probably not so likely that he has a lot of intentions, but he makes really interesting works of art and they also sell them.

So yeah, you don’t really know. Art is really fuzzy. It gets repeated, it gets legitimized by different people in different ways. There’s different ways of appreciating it and intentions play a huge role. Now all these complexities, they also make art really interesting. They make it such an interesting part and I think that is why we make it a part of our lives, why we bother to go to different things and see different performances and stuff like that.

So art is life and I wanna talk a bit about how art impacts us in our lives. What can art do? It can do lots of interesting things. Like it can make us think about stuff. It can make us consider things. Sometimes it makes the artist consider things. If you ask a group of children to paint the internet, you get wildly different results, as I learned yesterday from Linda.

Artists also process their lives through their art. Like if you like some sports but not others, you could make music about that.

Frida Kahlo, an artist whose parents were German and Mexican, processed her divorce through a work of art that got really famous, the Two Friders.

And this is kind of showing the different hers, like the different versions of her. She processed what happened, her own childhood maybe, and also her divorce into this work. At least that’s what the descriptions explain about it.

Artists also can make us as an audience think. It can show us futures that we should not want. Some people treat it as a manual though, and that is not how it was meant. But like George Orwell’s “1984” is an example of that. We got to see different futures shown by artists. They can also show us what’s wrong in reality. In “Vent Massive Attack”, they like to show statistics about the world behind them when they’re playing their music. And it gets really intense because they show things like how much budget the US spent on their wars, and like how many people died, and all these kinds of things. And I was looking after you see them twice this year. And the first time, I was pretty upset when I left it. Like I really enjoyed the music, but it’s also really, you know, you get confronted with a lot of things that are really bad about the world. Art can do that to you. Art can also be a mirror to reflect, like it can show us different perspectives. There is a play currently in the Netherlands where they talk about a court case that was done by a climate activist against the oil company Shell.

And in this play, they have five different monologues, five different people that explain their part of the story. And by looking at this, you can understand the different people in there. So you can hear the CEO of Shell, like the kind of troubles that he has, versus like the climate activist, like how different people think about it. And I think it’s really important that we still see each other’s perspectives, even if we think they are terrible or great. Like we need to explore different perspectives, and art can really help with that.

Art can also show us people that we know in different ways, like the artist Banksy in Bristol, he made this painting of the British parliament where he replaced every MP with a monkey.

Which can make you think about the state of things. Here in Berlin, in the concert house, the artist Ai Weiwei, he put a lot of life vests around the columns that are in front of this big concert house. And these life vests he got from Lesbos in Greece, they all belong to refugees that have come into Europe. And by looking at this work of art, you can see the scale of what our politics affect on the world. So it’s a really powerful medium to kind of express different things about the world and make you think about what’s going on and maybe what we have input on.

Art can also move us in lots of different ways, like feelings of nostalgia when Paul McCartney was singing about yesterday that always traveled seems so far away.

It can give you feelings of heartache or understand them better, which you can get from Adele.

Or Ai Weiwei, again, he made this work of art where you can look inside of the prison cells that he was put in by the Chinese government. And I visited that exhibition and I really felt like, wow, how hard this must have been, because you can see there’s no windows, you can see the kind of control that gets exercised by a government onto different people. So it can really move you different kinds of art.

To prove that that’s the case, a museum in Toronto, they hand out heart monitors. So when you walk through that museum with the heart monitor, they record what your heart is doing if it’s beating faster at certain pieces of art. They have a nice app with that, so you can see which bits of art were most impressive to you. And as I mentioned earlier, art gets appreciated differently by different people and everyone will have different heartbeats seeing different things based on their own experiences.

Art can also take a stance. When you make a slide deck, you can choose which words you use as an example for the different things that you’re doing. (Applause) Yeah.

Great job, Manuel.

It can also be shown to show solidarity.

There are some people from left by donkeys who went to the Russian embassy in London and they took two big bags of paint and they put them onto the street. They stopped all the cars in the process to make sure that they wouldn’t drive over them just yet. And they poured all the paint over the street.

Now, you can guess what happened after that. The cars all started driving over this paint and it made a huge Ukrainian flag. So art can be used to show solidarity and I think that’s important because staying silent in times like this is problematic. Like, we need to do the opposite and we’ll kind of be out there and this is a way to do it, especially if we do it altogether. It would be hard to blame specific people.

Art can also support movements. So Marvin Gaye’s song “What’s Going On?” was about the Vietnam War and how many people were sent there and died.

But also more recently, Kendrick Lamar made this song called “All Right,” which is about police violence against black people in the US. And it became sort of an anthem in the Black Lives Matter protest that followed.

He also performed on top of a police car there and he explained that for him, that’s a performance piece after he sends his act. It’s music for him to express himself. And I think that makes music really powerful, that you can make songs and in the case of “All Right,” it also gave people hope,

which maybe now isn’t so valid anymore.

Vincent van Gogh painted these beautiful sunflowers in 1888.

Now, he didn’t know that this art would also become part of a movement. Sometimes it happens against the wishes of the artist. So if they throw paint at it, in the case of this artist, they threw paint at this work at the National Border Gallery in London and it became part of the global anti-climate change protests and stuff.

Another cool thing that art can do is it captures complex human experiences and that is super powerful because it can show us that we’re not alone. It can show us specific feelings, like what it is like to love,

and almost all pop music is about that. But when I was in the same, I don’t believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now. There must have been lots of people that felt that, right?

Or the Backstreet Boys famously sung lots about love as well.

Any Backstreet Boys fans here? I see some. Yeah, awesome. Cool.

Sometimes art can capture what it’s like to try and understand other people. The Nobel Prize-winning author Hank Kang, she wrote The Vegetarian, which is a book about someone who had really violent dreams, about violence against animals one night, and then woke up the next day and decided, “I am going to be a vegetarian,” and it changed everything about her life and the relationships with the people around her. The book is not about vegetarianism at all, only in a title, really, and in that first kind of bit. Things got very violent in there, but it beautifully shows what it is like. And then our complex emotions that are really hard to capture in a few words. You need a whole novel for that to talk about these kinds of things, especially if they’re in a specific culture as well.

I’ve listened a lot to this album by a Dutch hip-hop formation called Iceland, and they made an album this year that is basically about what it’s like to be fed up with the status quo. They talked about lots of stuff, like hypercapitalism, alluring WWU3, like the next world war is coming, and the normalisation of anti-American politics.

All these kinds of things, where it feels like it’s really hard to do anything about this. We’re all seeing it, and it’s happening, and we hate it.

And we have hypocrisy there as well. So they capture that sort of emotion inside of their music. A lot of hip-hop can capture emotions like that.

And sometimes art can capture emotions like what it’s like to be young, which Sally Rooney does a lot in her novels.

And then art can also record collective memories, like wars, like Guernica by Pablo Picasso,

and also book burnings here in Berlin on the open flat. So you can see this library. It’s an empty library that would have fit 30,000 books, but it’s completely empty. And it refers to the early 1930s, when a Nazi student club decided to burn 30,000 books that they didn’t like.

What’s also special about art is that it doesn’t have to fit in. You can make any type of art. It doesn’t really need to fit within things like capitalism. Art provides you an agency.

If you go to LinkedIn, it’s going to tell you how to respond to people. But what this basically does is that it lets you use language that fits within what’s normal, like the normal kinds of response. But the LinkedIn world is not really normal. And it doesn’t really challenge anything about how we interact. Like everyone says the same things, and high fives each other in the same way.

Oliver Geisselstein noted that in his article about AI in writing. “I’m so good at simulating school and business languages,” he said. “Because a lot of our own understanding in both ways is also largely simulated.” We’re like faking it at one another.

So, you know, think about what you will.

Art can also insult the audience, which I find a really interesting concept.

There is a play called Offending the Audience by Hunker, which is basically actors going on the stage and shouting at the audience. Terrible stuff.

This happens too. Art doesn’t have to soothe everyone or get everyone excited. It can also insult people. Damien Hirst has done that a lot as well. He made this exhibition about butterflies, and they’re basically flying around in this room. And eventually, over the months of this exhibition, they all die because they stick to the walls. It’s really cruel, and people also protested against it.

And you know, sometimes mistakes can be really beautiful in art. That’s also something that makes art so interesting, that it’s got a human touch to it.

So, art can do lots of things. It can make us think, it can move us, it can take a stance, it can support movements, capture complex experiences, it can record memories, and all of these things are optional. So sometimes it will move us, sometimes it won’t. I’m personally not a big Oasis fan, but I appreciate that it exists maybe for other people. There’s lots of different things that different pieces of art do.

Now, I want to say that the point is not always the art itself. It’s usually the stuff that happens around the art. So it’s the artist’s intentions, rare reflections, the research that they’ve done, different skills they have, different worldviews that they put into the art that make the art really interesting. So it’s not so much the work that they produce with that, through that process, but it’s like all those things that happened before in the head of the artist. They go around the world, they go different places, maybe they stay in one place, but they have a certain life and that kind of gets reflected inside of the art.

They might have a specific voice, they might have live experiences that they’ve gone through, specific talents, backgrounds, culture, they all put it into their art. Optionally, right? Some of it might go into the art, some of it might not. But all of this exists.

And that makes it really hard. It’s really hard to contain the human experience, as Annabelle Gare said via Mia.

It sets up the circumstances that are simple and yet contain the ambiguities and the incongruity of human experiences. Human experience is very difficult and there’s only a few ways to kind of contain it within something. An art is one of the mediums that can actually do that.

And then art brings about a lot by itself as well. It gives people shared experiences, which is amazing. Like pop music is a promise that you are not listening alone. But it also brings about emotions, it gets people to reflect, get empathy, have more understanding, are inspired. All these kinds of things can be brought about by art and they are just the positive things, right? There’s also fascist art that can bring about terrible things in people. But art can bring about stuff in people.

And I’m going to use a massively overused analogy here. It’s a bit like an iceberg. So a large part of the iceberg is under the sea. Only a small part of it is actually visible. And I feel like that is also what’s the case with art, is that you can see artworks, but the whole kind of stuff around it is sort of invisible. The stuff that goes into the art, all of these intentions, all of these experiences and the stuff that happens afterwards. So all the influence that a piece of art has, sometimes decades after that it is made. Linda mentioned that as well. Like she made art, but she didn’t know how it’s going to have effects, like afterwards, what people are going to do with it.

So that makes the artwork itself only like one part of the whole equation. And if we look back at these tech CEOs who think they can make art with the press of a button, what they’re making is the artwork. And not all of that stuff that’s around it, not the whole iceberg is being created there.

It’s cool that we had that one urinal, but if I would go to the shop and purchase four more, I haven’t magically created four more works of art. It’s the same concept, like it’s the same stuff. And the second four, they’re not that interesting. It’s about that first one and the intentions that are there. Super often things are also in between the lines, right? The meaning is in between the lines. People are trying to say stuff, but they don’t put it in there literally. So it’s not about the product, it’s also about all the stuff surrounding it and interpretation of that.

I always try to interpret art like trying to figure out what do they mean. I was doing that this morning as well when Mia was talking. She’s talking about all these different ways that browsers and users are controlling what the web looks like. And I concluded this, control is bad. Mia said that, right, this morning. Did you hear it?

Yeah, yeah, she’s confirming.

She’s definitely said this this morning.

So the question is, can computers do these things? Can they have intentions? Can they reflect? Can they research stuff? Can they have skills? Can they put their experiences, their worldviews into the work?

I think they probably can’t, but I’ll add it to you to reflect on that as well.

Now, computers are awesome though. They can play a really big part of our toolset to make artifacts. Like we have pencils and we have lots of different ways of making art. And computers are one of those ways. And that’s great. I’m glad they exist. I love techno music, for instance, and I’m glad that digital techno music is a thing. We wouldn’t have Toby here. We don’t have Toby here, actually. I don’t know where he’s gone. Oh, he’s here. Cool. Very unsettling to have him disappear like that.

So computers are basically part of our toolset. When they asked Mira Murati, who was until recently the CTO of OpenAI, she confirmed that too. She said, “It’s just a tool.” They asked her, like, “Can LLMs write scripts and creative works?” It’s something that journalists like to ask a lot. And she tools at that. She works for the company. But yeah, she explained it to her. It’s just a tool.

So yeah, it’s a tool. It might be a good tool for you too. So I want to reflect a bit, because if it’s a good tool, then there are some open questions I think that we do need to answer about computers in general.

And the big one here, and I think that’s a bit of an elephant in the room, but super important, is the environmental impact. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but all of the big tech companies, or at least Amazon and Google and Microsoft, they’ve gone and purchased nuclear power plants to meet the power demands that their big data centers have. And this is all because they want to put AI into everything. There’s a direct relation to that. And they are letting go of their net zero goals, which I think is really dangerous for all of us. People living around these data centers, they see their power costs go up as well, because of the massive demands there. There’s the problem of copyright infringement, which is inherent in AI. OpenAI admitted that when they talked to the House of Lords in the UK. They said it’s impossible to train our models without using copyrighted materials.

So it’s kind of necessary to make these AI systems.

It’s also a factor of form of use.

AI can be used to create fake news, which has happened on scale, to enable things like fascism and dictatorships. And it’s also used to create AI pornography. So people make pornography with photos of people who did not give permission to be in there. And that’s bad, it’s terrible. These are things that exist because these tools exist. So we need to be aware of it. It’s not open, so researchers can’t go in and find out about things like bias and research them fairly.

And specifically for our whole creativity thing, there’s the risk of dullness. I’m really worried that everything will get really dull if we just use computers. I think we need to use our intentions and our own backgrounds and cultures and experiences, put them into art. And yeah, we can use some tools, but the tools are not that important. I don’t think creativity to end that can be computed. I think art is as much about the artist and the audience and what’s going on around the art than the deliverable itself. Like Ada Loflöe said, we should be careful with that possibility of exaggerated ideas. She keeps kind of resonating in my head the last few weeks. Like, this is really important that we don’t overestimate the kind of things that computers do. They’re amazing, but we overestimate what they do. We can use computers to express ourselves creatively, like Toby is doing all day.

But making creative work is about process, it’s about intentions, about creativity, and not the output or the different tools.

So I want to end with that. I love computers, but they don’t use creativity in a way that artists do. And I think that’s something we need to kind of keep realising and challenging one another about.

Because we don’t do that enough. And the kind of predominant thing in our technology industry is, you know, these tools are amazing, they’re doing a great job. And please give us more money, because I guess that’s a large part of it, right? It’s a money-making machine, too.

I want to leave you with two takeaways. One is to go in and make more art. So sign up for that pottery class or join a pottery studio. Mia, I’m looking at you.

You can join a choir, you can join a band, you can make, like, paintings and stuff.

James Blake posted that this morning. In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing about the dark times. Something to keep in mind. And secondly, the second takeaway, you should also go and enjoy art. So go to those museums, read the descriptions, try and understand what’s going on or don’t, and be inspired. Be inspired by the different things that people put out there, because it’s a lot more interesting than just the computers. Computers are awesome, but we’ve got to experience that creativity and art.

And with that, I want to thank you very much.