Choosing to Create Wisely: Guiding Your Creative Workflow & Toolkit for Generative Development

Creativity & deep inquiry has always been central to my sense of self, soul and connectedness of spirit with others - creating is a deeply human practice. Many pivotal moments and communities have shaped how I create my sense of wholeness for example, experiences and experiments woven together like 5D tapestries around me. For 4 decades, many of these #creative processes have included both physical art and media making combined with digital tools from computers to tablets and smartphones for #NeRFs and #worldbuilding for #conceptdesign and production endeavors.

Choosing which tools to engage and how to ask bigger questions is a big part of my creative process to engage in making media together with others, whether creating solo or when working with a team on creative pursuits.

We're making big leaps now: how we work together matters

Essential conversations are heating up in public now about the exponential risk of #AI and specifically how accelerating change affects culture, creativity, the #futureofwork and how we choose to collaborate together with these tools fairly and wisely. Companies that engage deeply with AI tools are required to reconsider their use of fair use, open source, collaborative creative content (with full attribution and pay for creative participants) and how to create systems and policies that maintain integrity of work in the face of massive change and easy manipulation of reality. How do you want your teams working with these tools?

Choosing to engage in collaboration and creative expansion with new tools without allowing the tool to guide and fully shape the creative process is the work of producers, artists, musicians, writers and anyone who engages in a creative process today. We are all choosing which tools to pick up and which to leave behind. Your choices and inquiry are valuable in this time of change.

Creative paired programming with a mix of humans and algos combined can be creatively liberating, but it requires some dedication to be the director and guide of that workflow and process, not become a product of it. I love experimenting and exploring as part of my creative play for example, but also still write, paint, take pictures and enjoy sculpture physically. One new media toolkit doesn't reduce my love for the others.

As generative tools like AI become increasingly powerful, discussions about their impact on culture, creativity, and the #futureofwork are growing in importance. These conversations often touch on existential risks, but also address subtler challenges like shifting public values, the potential for AI to perpetuate negative traits such as greed, and the implications for fair use and collaboration in creative content. I often choose to put down a tool for example if I test it and find it lacking, whether that is a reflection on the development, the team or how it is used or misused both in context and potentially out of context.

Companies seeking to harness AI for creativity must develop policies that ensure their colleagues and customers can engage with the work: those policies now being revisited include fair attribution, compensation for creators and integrity in the quality of work. Refining ethical policies around engagement with the thousands of new generative tools in our everyday software suites requires striking a balance between leveraging AI tools without becoming overly dependent on them while retaining human, collaborative control, curation, editing and direction over the creative process. Working together on critical thinking about AI makes this process much more interesting in collaboration at work, adding both useful pushback and creative iteration to the process of engaging a new tool or workflow.

Generative design tools are now baked into Canva, Office and many work software suites used daily by billions around the world. Now is the right time to be careful and considered in how you choose to engage with this new form of creativity as your teams and students are already there.

Here are key considerations to help your team or business navigate the creative use of generative tools effectively:

1. Embrace experimentation with generative collaboration together: Combining human and AI talents can yield impressive result and it is essential to maintain a guiding role in the workflow, preventing any flawed tool from dominating or leading the creative process. Encouraging employees to collaborate with AI together can help your team retain their unique perspectives and skills; human critical thinking and editing are key to generative collaborative work. Every tool is flawed. Humans will need to spot where work can be improved; this is the work of editing and curation.
2. Diversify your creative toolkit: New media and generative tools can complement traditional creative practices like writing, painting, music composition and sculpture without replacing the role of the artist and creator in the creative process. Encourage your team to experiment with various tools to foster a dynamic and versatile creative environment in any media.
3. Anticipate risks and plan ahead: Be proactive in identifying and addressing potential challenges that may arise from using generative tools. Iterate policies and reconsider the impact of economic factors and social value systems on development and growth of your work with these technologies.
4. Learn from nature and intelligent systems that work well over time: Explore how generative tools can help us understand and replicate the inherent creativity found in nature and other complex systems. This can inspire innovative and interesting solutions to business challenges and foster a more sustainable and interconnected approach to growth.
5. Ask whether specific tools match your ethics, values, data needs and goals and engage in this process with others, transparently within your organization. There are often open source tools for example that can achieve goals effectively while tools can be paid for directly by the creator, whether open source or developed in communities like Hugging Face.

By engaging in thoughtful dialogue and intentional experimentation, businesses can engage wisely with generative tools for creative collaboration while maintaining ethical standards and human agency in their work. Attending to issues like open source choices, which tools to use and how those licenses and attribution details change how you are currently collaborating can create a positive feedback loop and correct decades of missed attribution in existing media. Expand what we consider as fair attribution on massive media projects such as film and video games where thousands of people collaborate with hundreds or thousands of tools and imagine what our world can be when we find ways to attribute and see the patterns connecting everything, all the way down the line #AIinBusiness #CollaborativeCreativity #EthicsInAI #Realitycraft

These deep dive ethical conversations now happening in public were a part of our daily GSP graduate program at Singularity University a decade ago; I was lucky to sit next to many experts on all sides of this conversation. Debates on ethical engagement and policy played out together in the classroom as we workshopped options for public engagement with AI tools and systems together.

The challenges of exponential change haven't changed; they've expanded.

Many of the most cautious and wise specialists in AI and computer science from many different disciplines hold complex and not necessarily aligned beliefs and concerns about risks; some of these risks are real, others are acute or perceived but are less likely to be realized. Fear and existential risk is real; it is also a sales tool as well as a research field that has needed the light of day, requiring diverse and insightful humans to rapidly train other humans to discover how these tools connect throughout our lives. Inquiry is a good place to begin - asking questions together. Greed and capitalism as a guiding principle in business is also a factor in competitive development and will affect us all as nations end up directly competing based on their AI and computing systems; in this case it is important to wisely call out when capitalism and corporatism are not in line with human value and long term survival of all species, not just our own.

These competing interests led many smart people to be concerned for the impacts of acceleration on human capacity to grow and thrive with these evolutionary leaps. Narrow AI tools have been a part of our lives for decades and regulations have wildly varied around the world; now we are all aware of being in a new age. We are now publicly discussing what has been happening between us for 20+ years as our technology devices connect us to a fundamental connection structure.

These changes already impact all of us and in some cases, they've been with us for decades. There's no easy path; no going back to a time before technology.

It's important to be clear about risks, manage and plan ahead and specifically engineer for these challenges while being mindful of how acceleration (and other factors such as economics, capitalism as a value system) that will play a role in how these tools evolve and "grow". I'm curious to hear from those engaging to amplify and understand nature and intelligent systems all around us through wise use of these tools. Get in touch as your team needs support for training, asking questions and engaging your team in rethinking concepts, development and workflows.