This week I unfortunately was unable to attend my classes due to issues related to post-wisdom teeth removal, which was very disappointing, but allowed me to work on my independence skills in working through the upcoming assignment, and the content for the week. I completed the readings, with the main focus being on the idea of creative constraints linked to how AI might provide limitations in our work. Feiten’s ‘Constructive Constraints’ from the reading list explores the idea that constraints can actually be highly beneficial to the creative work that we do, opposing the popular belief that constraints limit our ability to create to our full potential.

Throughout the week, I have done my own generating as a creative prompter where I have been attempting to work with AI to write a story, and generate it into a 2 minute video. I worked with ChatGPT to generate the story, where I asked the AI to write me a story about something very broad, to which it did, providing me with its own details and extra material. From here, I found that my brain became inspired and sparked new ideas from the material, which is where Feiten explains that being given nothing to work with, often can stump an individual or make an individual overthink and confuse themselves. Of course, this is not true all the time, as we know some of the greatest stories are created from minds only. Another way I have been thinking of it is that we are using ‘teamwork’ with AI. Just as for most films where it usually takes multiple people or a team who build up and work off each other’s ideas to produce a script and storyline, co-creating with an AI requires a level of this too. I have been tweaking prompts based off new ideas from AI and even asked AI for feedback or how to improve certain things in my prompts.

This week I took on my own academic research to further my knowledge on co-collaboration with AI, where I found a couple studies. One of which was conducted by Quian Wan who studied how normal, everyday people utilise AI to assist them in writing a story. It was found that many participants started off with a direct question asking the model to give them a story, as they did not know where to start, or had lack of inspiration. This is interesting as it demonstrates the ways that people who might not consider themselves creative or artists are able to become such through a new way. I think AI can give people the desire to create or make something new, which is in my opinion the most important part of life. We will not evolve or learn without the desire or will to do new things.

References:

Feiten, P., Larusson, H. and van Gelder, T., 2023. Constructive constraints: On the role of chance and randomness in the creative process. Journal of Creative Processes, 14(3), pp.155-176.

Wan, Q., Fan, X., Sun, Q. and Li, Y., 2024. ‘It felt like having a second mind’: Investigating human-AI co-creativity in prewriting with large language models. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 8(CSCW1), pp.1-26.