The concept of “co-creation” is particularly timely because it reframes the ethics of who creates, how, and why, not only interpreting the world but seeking to change it through a lens of equity and justice. An expansive notion, co-creation embraces a constellation of methods, frameworks, and feedback systems in which projects emerge out of process and evolve from within communities and with people, rather than being made for or about them. Co-creation, we contend, offers a hands-on heuristic to explore the expressive capacities and possible forms of agency in systems that have already been marked as candidates for some form of consciousness. In this article, we ask if humans can co-create with nonhuman systems and, more specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) systems. To find out, we interviewed more than thirty artists, journalists, curators, and coders, specifically asking about their relationships with the AI systems with which they work. Their answers often reflected a broader spectrum of co-creation, expanding the social conversation and complicating issues of agency and nonagency, technology and power, for the sake of human and nonhuman futures alike.
Co-creating with AI
William Uricchio is professor of comparative media studies at MIT, where he founded the Open Documentary Lab. A historian of old media when they were new, he explores such things as early nineteenth-century conjunctures between photography and telegraphy; the place of telephony in the development of television at the other end of the nineteenth century; and the work of algorithms in our contemporary cultural lives.
Katerina Cizek is a Peabody-awarded and two-time Emmy-winning documentarian working with emergent technologies. She is the artistic director, research scientist, and cofounder of the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab.
William Uricchio, Katerina Cizek; Co-creating with AI. the minnesota review 1 May 2023; 2023 (100): 118–131. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10320940
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