Sunday, February 04, 2024

AI: creative vox populi?

Generative AI is being promoted as a tool for creating new ideas, or augmenting content such as audio, text, images, and video, which is often shared on social media platforms, such as Instagram or TikTok. Indeed ideas are content. But more than this, generative AI has the potential to democratise design allowing greater participation in decisions around societal innovation. However, new ideas or content thus generated may not be that original but rather reconfigured versions of something done in the past. In fact, much creative content on media platforms is about remaking existing ideas, or piggy-backing off the creativity of others. Moreover, as generative AI is apt at generating variations of ideas, this may lead to a feedback loop where AI generates content that is already popular or proven to be successful on social media. That is, generative AI is socially embedded giving a boost to creative vox populi. Yet what is originality in the age of AI?  Revisiting older ideas, however, can be fruitful in problem solving ("what's wrong"), or in solution finding ("what's right"). That is, the circularity of ideas, in which each idea is revisited at intervals, at a more sophisticated level each time may help generate ideas for the emergent circular economy, defined as an industrial economy that is restorative or regenerative by value and design.

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