philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

How AI can help supercharge creativity

... Wilson, a researcher at the Creative Computing Institute at the University of the Arts London, is just one of many working on what’s known as co-­creativity or more-than-human creativity. The idea is that AI can be used to inspire or critique creative projects, helping people make things that they would not have made by themselves. She and her colleagues built the live-­coding agent to explore how artificial intelligence can be used to support human artistic endeavors—in Wilson’s case, musical improvisation. ...

...The aim is to develop AI tools that augment our creativity rather than strip it from us—pushing us to be better at composing music, developing games, designing toys, and much more—and lay the groundwork for a future in which humans and machines create things together. ...

But for a number of researchers and artists, the hype around these tools has warped the idea of what creativity really is. ...

These tools do not give you what you want; they give you what their designers think you want. ...

In short, existing generative models have made it easy to create, but they have not made it easy to be creative. ...

“Unfortunately, we’re removing the one thing that you have to do to develop creative skills for yourself, which is fail,” says Cook. “But absolutely nobody wants to hear that.” ...

Cook thinks the real promise of AI will be to help us get better at what we want to do rather than doing it for us. For that, he says, we’ll need to create new tools, different from the ones we have now. ...

Ask a range of researchers studying creativity to name a key part of the creative process and many will say: reflection. ...

Looking for ways that AI might support or encourage reflection—asking it to throw new ideas into the mix or challenge ideas you already hold—is a common thread across co-creativity research. ...

Bryan-Kinns is fascinated by how artists and designers find ways to use new technologies. “If you talk to artists, most of them don’t actually talk about these AI generative models as a tool—they talk about them as a material, like an artistic material, like a paint or something,” he says. “It’s a different way of thinking about what the AI is doing.”  ...

Bryan-Kinns sums it up like this: “The problem is that you’ve got this gulf between the very commercial generative tools that produce super-high-quality outputs but you’ve got very little control over what they do—and then you’ve got this other end where you’ve got total control over what they’re doing but the barriers to use are high because you need to be somebody who’s comfortable getting under the hood of your computer.”

“That’s a small number of people,” he says. “It’s a very small number of artists.” ...

Some have claimed that writing prompts is itself a creative act. “But no one struggles with a paintbrush the way they struggle with a prompt,” says Cook. ...

See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/10/1114256/ai-creativity-art-collaboration-music/