Just wanted to capture for posterity the full unedited text I sent to the Debrief for their article on the AI Creators Letter sent to US Congress.

AI technology is poised to have massive impacts across all of society. Consequently, a whole-of-society approach is needed to confront these changes, and to direct them into forms which will most benefit humanity and the flourishing of the creative human spirit. 

Too frequently, the high level conversations about the proper paths of evolution for these technologies are dominated by the big established players from industry, government, civil society and academia. Their voices – and the social and economic incentives driving them – tend to drown out everyone else. But it is not just engineers, entrepreneurs, politicians, professors and experts who will be impacted. It is everyone. 

The AI Creators Letter, developed by a dozen or so professional artists actively using AI tools, in collaboration with Creative Commons, Fight for the Future, aims to level this playing field by asking the US Congress to include artists as an essential component in ongoing conversations about the potential of AI. 

We believe artists can bring to the table a uniquely creative and humanistic perspective backed by countless hours of first-hand experience and deep intuitive understanding of these tools and their best uses. We believe that artists can act as representatives of that defining spark and spirit of expression, and the enduring values of human culture passed down through the ages, of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. 

The future has always been made by artists, writers, and people using their imagination to envision new possibilities, and make them into realities through the creative act. 

Just like artificial intelligence itself, which was first the province of science fiction, a great deal of modern technology as we know it today was first dreamed up, and then written down, painted, or sung by visionaries who explored and pushed the boundaries of reality beyond the known into something new and other.

As artificial intelligence picks up steam in practical applications, it only makes sense from an innovation perspective once again to turn to artists and creators of all stripes to help us find the right course – one which neither policymakers alone, nor academics, civil society, or industry would find without artists and our open-ended journeys into the what-ifs presented by modern technologies.

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