Onformative Studio shares its expirence using a generative AI to create 3D sculptures:
We were guided by the question of how our role as the designer is changing when human creativity and artificial intelligence co-create. In the course of the AI’s sculpting process we were inspired by the unpredictable strategies and outcomes of the reinforcement learning: an experimental approach par excellence, which we guided, observed and visualized.
Above all, we have also questioned our own role as creators. Rather than leaving creation to AI, we need to find ways to integrate it into the creative process. We take technology as a starting point, a tool, a source of inspiration and a creative partner. The human aspect is quite clear in this: We choose the rules and define the approximate output. However, in the end it was the interplay between our human choices and the agent’s ability to find the best solutions and occasionally surprise us. This made the process rewarding to us and shows the true potential of an AI based co-creation process.
This reminds me of some of the ideas Noah Smith and Roon laid out in their recent article about generative AI:
We think that the work that generative AI does will basically be “autocomplete for everything”.
What’s common to all of these visions is something we call the “sandwich” workflow. This is a three-step process. First, a human has a creative impulse, and gives the AI a prompt. The AI then generates a menu of options. The human then chooses an option, edits it, and adds any touches they like.
There’s a natural worry that prompting and editing are inherently less creative and fun than generating ideas yourself, and that this will make jobs more rote and mechanical.
Ultimately, though, we predict that lots of people will just change the way they think about individual creativity. Just as some modern sculptors use machine tools, and some modern artists use 3d rendering software, we think that some of the creators of the future will learn to see generative AI as just another tool – something that enhances creativity by freeing up human beings to think about different aspects of the creation.
I am optimistic that generative AI will continue to make creative expression of all kinds more accessible. At first, AI assisted design will be viewed as lower status or less authentic, like baking brownies using a pre-made box mix instead of “from scratch.” Later, though, once these technologies become more established, not using an AI will prompt discussion and warrant explanation — AI collaboration will be the norm. This is already the case with smartphone photography.