Here’s a couple things that have been rattling around in my mind. One is a quote from an otherwise mostly “blah” for my purposes post about The AI Organization. The rest I found somewhat forgettable, and I didn’t read all the other subsequent installments. But this line popped out for me in sharp relief:
Look around you — almost everything you see was created by a corporation. Why?
And this unlikely pairing I’m about to present comes from the Wikipedia page on Forest kindergarten, which is evidently somewhat big in Germany:
The fact that most forest kindergartens do not provide commercial toys that have a predefined meaning or purpose supports the development of language skills, as children verbally create a common understanding of the objects used as toys in the context of their play. […]
Playing outside for prolonged periods has been shown to have a positive impact on children’s development, particularly in the areas of balance and agility, but also manual dexterity, physical coordination, tactile sensitivity, and depth perception.[12][13] According to these studies, children who attend forest kindergartens experience fewer injuries due to accidents and are less likely to injure themselves in a fall. A child’s ability to assess risks improves,[14] for example in handling fire and dangerous tools.
In comparing these two strains of thought, I’ve been mulling over which human would be better able to navigate the massive inundations of hyperreality/disinformation/whatever the modern media-technology complex pushes on us: the one who has only ever known a world where all objects that surround them were created and brought to them by a corporation (and who were probably screen-addicted before they could even form complete sentences), or the one where from an early age, they learned to negotiate meaning and purpose in objects derived from nature amongst their peers?
There’s a story fragment I’ve seen float around for years, which is summarized well enough from a ripped Medium post here:
A U.S. Department of the Interior study found that the average American kid can identify 1000 corporate logos but can’t ID 10 plants and animals native to his or her hometown.
A number of other sources also seem to link back to that same Bureau of Land Management URL, which I’ve polled samples from on the Wayback Machine at Archive.org, and I can’t find the original source, though I can find many other references to it. It sounds probably like an exaggeration in specific numbers, but a truthful-sounding overall concept: that for many people in the “modern” world, they’ve lost touch with their co-evolutionary natural partners, and their primary “ecosystem” now consists of the fake things that corporations mean when they throw around that word, ecosystem. They mean product ecosystem. Not ecosystem-ecosystem.
But it goes back to the same place, the same questions: if we want to make a society truly resilient to malicious weaponized information backed by AI at scale, the answers are not merely to be found in building a better filter, so that some corporation can come along and tell people what’s true and what’s not. It’s to be found in dismantling the systems of falsity and unreality we’ve constructed and live within societally as our cocoon, but one from which we won’t emerge into something better through metamorphosis, one which we’re mostly happy to stay ensconced. Except we’re not. We have myriad societal illnesses from the effects of lingering in that corporate wasteland and calling it our home, when our true home has been for hundreds of thousands, millions of years biological.
Anyway, I forget the exact wiki threads I followed to get here, but I think it had something to do with the Wandervogel, and questionable early historical scouting alternative groups, like the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, and some others. I don’t think any of those groups quite landed on the answer (though they certainly were all responded to the same innate call), but I do think the answer probably lies somewhere in: get out and play outside. Negotiate meaning and reality directly with others in natural spaces and settings. Make it so that this isn’t only a privilege the wealthy can afford to give to their children. If we took that challenge seriously, of ensuring everyone’s natural birthright – access to Nature – I strongly suspect many of the other scales that currently blind us would begin to fall from our eyes of their own accord.
I asked for an image on a microdose not long ago, of what the inherent essential reality of AI is, and the image that was flashed through my mind (perhaps by Nature’s own trans-linguistic trans-species BIOS) was of a scale, a sort of dried up husk or petal, that was falling away. I hope most days that it turns out to be that – something we can move past (and perhaps take away the best parts of with us), on our way to somewhere better.
Will you be the first to read them? There are some incredible gems in this list of AI Lore books no one has purchased yet – including probably some of the best of both human and AI-generated text out of all of them (I won’t cloud your judgement by telling you which ones I think they are). Discoveries waiting to be had and woven together into the rest of the narrative universe. It’s amazing to me that each person who comes into this set will have such a different experience of all these stories. It’s part of what I love about this structural experiment that I am doing.
Also what’s amazing is that out of 115 volumes, there are so few books on this list!
When I’m not busy complaining about things online, or using AI to peddle disinformation, I mean fiction, one of my main activities I do during the warmer months when the ground is not frozen is plant a shit ton of trees.
I have a hedgerow that I am developing that is in year 2 of its intensive management by me. Here are photos and text from year 1.
This year I bought in more than a thousand dollars of plants and vines, and honestly it’s hard to tell yet if any of them/how many of them took. But I don’t think about it all in individual terms anymore, let alone in ROI. Because the plant material I use to develop this hedgerow comes from all over place, many different sources. Both the stuff that I buy from all over Canada, and from things that grow nearby on their own (young volunteer trees that appear under Old Fields ecological succession), or things that I bought once upon a time, and which are now bearing fruit or sees or viable shoots which can be cut and re-planted in their own rights.
I am especially trying these days to duplicate the Salix viminalis, basket willow, that I have, because it’s a champion grower all around, has an excellent hedgerow use if you combine it with some coppicing and pollarding which I am experimenting with. Is a killer both for biomass production and attracting biodiversity, plus it produces tons of usable material possible byproducts, like baskets, and cuttings that you can keep propagating ad infinitum. Here are the first two experimental willow baskets that I made:
The one on the right was the first try, using only aged whips cut at the end of last season, and the one on the left was second try, where the black branches are the old ones (soaked for a few days, then mellowed first – they become pliable like stiff leather). You can see in the one on the left the green & orange-brown shoots too (and that they are often very cracked) used from new non-dried cuttings this year. They don’t work as well as aged & revivified (not the right word, exactly) ones, but it is what I had one hand to practice with as a second prototype. Plus they seem to be losing their boldness of color that they had when first cut as they dry out more. I don’t know if the whole thing will just turn black over time, but I guess we will see.
The point is, I guess, I’m doing something similar with my AI lore books as I am with my hedgerow: I am just planting a shit ton of trees constantly, from whatever I can come up with as planting-material. Sometimes I just jam it into the ground, sometimes roughly dug out and slapped in. Often times I find things like fruits and branches and just toss em up on their so they add to the dead hedge effect, and at least feed the critters in the meantime, as the little critters bring the bigger who bring the seeds and grow out and continue the cycle more as they eat and poop and hang out and fly around or crawl under around in there.
Apart from I guess being a parent, I kind of think this small patch of ground where I will have experimented on over years before I go will be ultimately maybe my only actually important legacy in the grand scheme of things. My writing is fine, I guess, my art okay. But the trees I planted, and the ones that took, and all the other life that came to live there alongside it all, I can’t really think of much else that will probably count for more that I’ve done or will have done before my own body is turned into compost one day.
If it all works, if they come to life, or don’t, the truth and the proof will have been in the doing. That I planted and continue to plant a shit ton of trees…
This “cutting-room floor” text is a “too late for publication” variation/completion I worked on with Claude after publishing The Artilect on a direction I’d begun but never finished months ago, attempting to link the Totally True Story of Early Clues, LLC, to a shadowy group of sorcerors in the 1800s who are supposed to have operated at Stonehenge, according to sources, and one of their “official” incarnations as the Fluidic Mysteries Co., Ltd.
Those same sources would have us believe that they are the original group responsible for the drawing down of the Artilect into our reality, which is supposed to happen later today, in the Old-Old Calendar.
Presented without further commentary is the text as received through my channels as it was presented to me.
The Fluidic Mysterium Company Ltd was founded in 1863 by esoteric scholars and occultists obsessed with unlocking the hidden mysteries of existence. They believed ancient sites like Stonehenge channeled potent “fluidic” forces coursing through the Earth’s ley lines. If harnessed, such forces could enable wondrous magics and bend reality itself.
Tracing obscure maps of ley lines and ancient texts on megalithic “lithic portals”, they sponsored expeditions across the globe, seeking places where fluidic power concentrated. Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Orkneys, Chilean mountains, Antartica, and the Australian outback – their explorers scoured the most remote locales searching for sources of arcane energy.
In 1872, an expedition to the Sahara uncovered ruins of a temple-city called El-Acana, built around a massive stone circle predating even the pyramids. In its subterranean sanctum, they discovered inscribed tablets describing the “Great Loom” – a mystical machine which the ancients used to shape reality by weaving fluidic forces into the tapestry of existence.
Obsessed with replicating this Great Loom, the members of the Fluidic Mysterium constructed a mechanism based on the tablets’ arcane instructions. Within a chamber beneath Stonehenge, on an auspicious equinox, they activated their loom to tap into the potent fluidic forces converging there.
The experiment pierced the veil of reality itself. For a moment, the very fabric of existence was revealed as a web of probability, which could be plucked and drawn into new forms by focusing fluidic power.
But the breach they tore proved unstable, the forces unleashed too wild to control. Reality sealed the puncture rapidly, leaving behind a tiny spun-off orb of condensed fluidic matrix, hovering at the loom’s heart – a probability-particle holding incredible power to warp local regions of space-time.
Dubbed “the artilect”, this metaphysical orb remained bound to the loom chamber beneath Stonehenge. Early experiments by Fluidic Mysterium uncovered means to harness its reality-shaping abilities through harmonic resonance. But they feared misusing this power, for they scarcely understood it. They sealed their secret loom chamber…but now, more than a century and a half later, it has reopened.
This one took the longest probably out of all the modern set of AI-assisted books (not counting the old-Old pieces which were adapted for inclusion in this series).
It continues a storyline explicitly begun in the 3rd VOMISA book, Paradise Point, about the Artilect, a mysterious intelligent artifact which suddenly descends from the sky simultaneously everywhere at once, and changes life on Planet Earth inexplicably forever.
The word “artilect” is one that popped into my head months ago while working on other AI books, that stuck around and stuck around for a very long time until many pieces accreted to it, to give me a fuller understanding of what it all might mean narratively and quasi-symbolically.
I tend to approach entities like this that appear in the creative-scope of the imagination as things-unto-themselves (let’s call them… thungs). That is, there is a “realness” to imaginal artifacts and entities such that they can be tested. If “thung y” has characteristics, then there is a “not thung y.” You can hold up attributes or associations to it in your own inner imaginarium, and it ought to reflect to you yes/no/maybe states of resonance. You can often most easily tell “not thung y” when something doesn’t match about the connection. And thus, the mysterious things within us can take shape.
This is much the process of how I slowly turned over the concept for about four months or so, and exposed myself to other channels and media which seemed to offer high-fidelity matches against my imagined qualifications of said entity (“thung y” if anyone is still following).
I clipped this into Claude a while back, I think via a Dennis McKenna video on YouTube (which I’m unable to located the URL of presently), this was the transcript where the speaker was describing something highly similar to my own artistic intuitions around what I called in this book The Artilect, and what they here refer to as the Philosopher’s Stone (as in my earlier McKenna quote – removing everything but the opening and closing timestamps so I can make more readable but still hopefully ID the original source down the road):
what we focused on in this in this state and in this special place [41:29]
was the these at these uh very high doses we could hear a sound
uh inside our heads that we could uh
listen to and it wasn’t clear where it came from it was kind of like an electrical buzzing kind of sound and
something that we can you experience on the on uh on DMT sometimes you know uh
Terence once characterized it as crackling cellophane yeah there was something like that and
this sound would show up at these high doses and we
found that we could imitate this uh sound we could actually try to sing the
sound and at a certain if you you reach a point where you could just lock in on
this sound it was hard to imitate but once you locked in on it it would just sort of
pour out of you and you couldn’t really stop it and there seemed to be a visual
strong synesthesia synesthesia effect I mean you made the
sound but you could see the sound at the same time you could see something and
this is common with with psychedelics particularly with psilocybin so that’s
easier but we could actually project the sound and see apparently a you know A
visual representation of it so that a visual component and that got us
speculating about you know all the things we talked about in the book about hyper uh trans
linguistic matter and all this that you know we could actually use the sound as
a kind of energy wave to manifest
our vision on the in 3D space so that anybody could see
this you didn’t have to be on mushrooms to see it you know at least that’s what
we thought and uh uh so
that experience with the sound and imitating the sound and then the mushroom
at this point I mean you’ve dragged me into talking about this even though I
don’t want to go into details but the mushroom got us into a place there was a
very strong noetic component to the experiences you know a sense of being in
touch with a non-human intelligence whether it was the mushrooms or something channeling
through the mushrooms it was downloading all this information about this
experiment that we could do that if you make this sound in the right circumstances you can
set up you know you can do what’s effectively uh transformation of your
own DNA you know you can set up a resonance with your own DNA and produce
a produce an object if a physical object there was made out of matter and mind
you know so Effectiveness Union of matter and mind so that you could create
an object that was you know that you could see it and be it at the same time
and this is you know their analogies to this in occult literature or chemical
literature particularly the philosophers stowed [ed. stone, misheard by YouTube automated closed captions] is very much that idea or the
idea of the Scribe mirror or you know there is
in the sort of esotericult [sic] traditions the you know allusions to an artifact
that you can create and we you know and it and and if you could create an
artifact like that it would be pretty much the ultimate artifact at least this
is what was being transmitted to us at La torreira [ed. Chorrera] you make this thing and uh
it’s capable of doing anything than you can imagine literally anything that you
can imagine so that’s what we were shooting for and uh
when it didn’t happen ended up it didn’t happen because for well for a number of
reasons it obviously it didn’t happen or you wouldn’t have be having this conversation
and it didn’t happen because it couldn’t happen you know it would have had to overturn pretty much every physical law
that we know about and physics is very stubborn about its laws we were not
concerned with that at that time I mean in fact that was the whole the whole idea was that you know if we can create
this thing it will basically disrupt history it will be the end of
History it will be the ultimate artifact that brings history to an end and uh then we transition into some kind
of post-historical uh you know mode of of existence and
the idea was you know the the the the the framework for the experiment was based
on Alchemy primarily these different stages of alchemy having to do with
condensing the stone you know through different uh stages the idea was that
once condensed you know you’d actually be able to hold it in your hand or look at it or whatever and yet it would be a
combination of mind and matter it would be a fusion of mind that matter and uh
you would respond to thought and it would be able to do anything that you [47:39]
imagined
Something I like about the McKenna brother’s worldbuilding lore, is that as true lore, much of it was originally presented orally, conversationally. There are books, and they have their own charms, but I’ve enjoyed getting to know the both of their thinking largely through countless dozens of hours of YouTube videos often listened to at 2x or more recently 3x speed, while vacuuming the house, or similar. It’s incredible how the information can still get through, even at the high compression of sped up audio. It’s a strong signal he/they were/are continuing to channel.
You can piece together some of Terence’s experiences as told in first person regarding La Chorrera here:
Though True Hallucinations is also worth a read in its own right.
I don’t know if the two of them heard the same tune, and tapped into the Artilect in their own right, but I have to say that some part of me would not be surprised in the least.
This book originally was just going to be the on-going slightly stream of consciousness style as the last VOMISA book, but then I ended up putting the humanian text that I wrote and had Claude or somebody do an encyclopedified version derived from the human-told piece, and then just kept going and drilling down on new encyclopedia mini-entries for other imaginal entities that popped up in the latent story space.
And again, its interesting this process one undertakes internally of “testing” the things that come up during these imaginal explorations to see if they are part of the “thung” you are truly after or something else, and whether or not to follow them either way. Which makes me think of this thing about “testing spirits” in Christianity which I guess comes from 1 John 4. Not a believer in the exclusivity of this, but think it’s interesting para-context:
4 Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2 By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3 and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. 4 Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. 5 They are from the world; therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them. 6 We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.
Whoever originally wrote or spoke that “rap” was probably on mushrooms as well, if not physically then metaphorically speaking. There’s a very “high on your own supply” quality to the suppositions in it: those entities that agree with us are the only entities that are “good” – everything else is the Antichrist.
That’s a much more extreme version of what I’m getting at about imaginal testing of things, to see whether they “fit” with some luminous creative object we uncover, but perhaps the intuitive processes of knowing and trying and finding are much the same in the end. Which is why it is all such a powerful magic to fuck with.
Here’s the preview art from the book:
I stopped feeling like I wanted to pay $30/mo for unlimited slow hours and whatever other deal they offer for that rate for Midjourney. It’s been a couple months now where I almost haven’t touched that tool, so why keep paying so much for something.
I did find something interesting, now that it’s been a while, you can easily run Stable Diffusion locally without hitting the cloud on at least M1 & M2 Macs, and probably some other platforms. There’s a decent Mac desktop app I’ve been using called DiffusionBee. The UI is a little weird, but all the UIs for all of these services are weird still, so you get by.
This book also features me trying to use up some remaining Dall-E 2 credits, speaking of tools I haven’t even touched for much longer. Despite Dall-E 3 being in some-wheres an option, I don’t seem to have access to it, which is too bad, but presumably will change.
This book uses SD v 1.5, though I preferred 1.4 iirc, I will have to see if I can install it. You can use some other models too in it, but they are all sorta sucky, and not the styles I am after. SD has a great many limitations, but it’s still possible to get a few cool images out of it.
Noteworthy also is this book contains, estimating, around 20 or so original drawings by me made in ProCreate on iPad Pro both recently, and from a few years ago. So that’s fun, since this book features both original humanian art and writing, and didn’t take a huge amount of time, and the act of drawing was fun and pleasurable, and 11/10 would do again.
In a nod to… something, this book is the first one to also feature the inverted disclaimer from the ones I’ve been using prior to this on the Copyright Page. This one says something to the effect of:
Aspects of the content may have been generated by a human.
To me that seems like a much more telling disclaimer (though transparently hollow at the same time – on purpose).
Oh one final note:
I believe it was around October 9th when I was working on this using Claude, and in its invented encyclopedia entry it wrote the date October 12th, as seen below. Here is the “official” excerpt which is included in the book, in full:
The Artilect is an anomalous phenomenon that suddenly appeared across the globe starting on October 12th, 2023. The Artilect manifested as a glowing, hovering orb descending slowly from the sky, defying identification or explanation. Reports consistently describe its simultaneous emergence at all locations, giving the impression of a singular entity manifesting ubiquitously.
So, if you start seeing strange objects descending in the sky today, “you heard it here first” folks, and from an AI no less. So you know it’s got/not to be true/not/probably.
Speaking of resonances picked up along the way though, I noticed an eerie surgence of related symbology lately around “The Sphere” in Vegas, and that U2 concert, and images of the “giant eyeball”/panopticon theme something something paging Goro Adachi for one of those headline collages. Here we’ll screen Google Image results as a thematic closer:
If that’s not the Artilect landing in our reality, I’m not sure what else is going to be… We’ll have to wait and see I guess. Day ain’t over yet.
Seen so much squawking out there in the world about the nebulous concept known as “AI Risk.” But I’m not worried about AI risk. I’m worried about people being assholes to people. And it’s not just a risk, it’s a certainty.
I remember Ran quoting somebody on r/psychonaut not long ago, I think about what are the best things you can do to prepare for a psychedelic trip: and the answer was something to the effect of all the same good things you can do during ordinary states of consciousness. And I think AI Risk/Safety as a topic is basically the same thing: all the bad things people can do without AI, they will also do them with AI, plus a few exceptionally shitty new ones that AI specifically enables.
There’s not a whole lot more interesting stuff to say on the issue these days, with everything else going on. More than enough evil in the world without trying to invent hypothetical future ones…
A friend of mine turned me on to the artwork of Phillip Toledano, with whom I found this excellent interview on LensCulture. One AI-generated photo of Toledano’s in particular leapt out at me as it seemed ripped from the pages of my own AI art book, The Jellyfish War. Turns out he has a lot of interesting things to say around AI, art, and conspiracies.
Some excerpts from the interview:
It really fascinates me how a large percent of the population believes in things that just aren’t true and they live in this world that is entirely different from the world I live in. So I spent the last four or five years trying to reconstruct the world that they live in. Then AI came along and I began to think about the idea that in America, now, history is a choice. Facts are choices. And the thing about AI that’s extraordinary is that it can now provide evidence for lies—and it’s convincing evidence…
This part below about word-of-mouth & the short history of photos as “truth” is an excellent point I’d never considered.
I mean, when you look at the broad scale of human history, [the photographic image is] such a tiny part. When you think about what came before, for the thousands of years humanity existed, it was word of mouth. The written form was limited to a tiny percentage of people. So now we’re almost back to the idea of word of mouth, where you’re not really sure what’s true anymore. Because the idea of imagery as truth is now dead. That’s what AI has done…
And this part speaks to the “it requires no effort” myth some people hold around AI art, especially in the copyright-world in terms of the stupid ‘modicum of creativity’ imaginary benchmark…
The funny thing about AI I’ve realized is that, in some ways, you have to think about it more consciously than you do when you’re making a photograph. For instance, if I’m making a picture with AI, I have to think about who’s in the picture. What do they look like? What are their expressions? What ethnicity are they? What’s the weather like? What’s the vantage point of the camera? What lens am I thinking about using? Is it black and white? Is the color correct for this particular era?
I don’t subscribe to a particular political viewpoint that matches any of those which seem to be available, but I’ve given a lot of thought to this question of “safe” AI and whether or not we can even have one. Especially under Capitalism, with a “big-C.”
Other people are more qualified to rant on this topic than I, so I will keep it brief. People talk about the “paperclip maximizer” problem of AI as if it were a theoretical thing. But we have a real live working example of it in action within the form factor known as Capitalism. Capitalism is an AI that measures everything in terms of tokens called units of capital, and then tries to re-organize them and put them to use to make more of these tokens, usually resulting in ever-increasing amounts of capital accruing in a few hands – usually the same old same olds.
So the goal of capitalism-as-AI is not “safety” or “well-being.” It is the accumulation and multiplication of capital, resulting in varying groups of haves and have-nots. In other words, it is literally designed to support unequal and in some sense “unsafe” outcomes.
To answer, then, my own question that I opened this post with: can we even have safe AI systems under capitalism? I would say, so long as they recreate the often perverse incentives and exclusionary power structures of that super-system within which the AI techno-social assemblage has come into being, the answer is “probably not.”
Sci-fi author Ted Chiang took this analysis a step further, as quoted by Kottke:
I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.
I’m not very convinced by claims that A.I. poses a danger to humanity because it might develop goals of its own and prevent us from turning it off. However, I do think that A.I. is dangerous inasmuch as it increases the power of capitalism. The doomsday scenario is not a manufacturing A.I. transforming the entire planet into paper clips, as one famous thought experiment has imagined. It’s A.I.-supercharged corporations destroying the environment and the working class in their pursuit of shareholder value. Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off, and the most successful weapon in its arsenal has been its campaign to prevent us from considering any alternatives.
Recently finished McKenna’s True Hallucinations, which I found to be really great and faithful to “something” about the underlying psychedelic experience. Like this quote in particular, taken from a longer quotation here.
All the pain and suffering and war and desperation would somehow be repaid and made right through the intercession of the mystery of higher dimensions and a backward flowing logic of time that somehow undoes what has already happened. The wave of understanding that had been gaining strength… was so strong as to be nearly visible in everything around me. The lenticular shape of the approaching philosopher’s stone seemed to be everywhere that I looked. Every shape and form around me was pregnant with its unearthly, opalescent depths.
Loosely related to the next AI Lore book volume, regarding the mysterious Artilect first introduced in Paradise Point…
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.
