Flying ideas

AIdeation happens where human creativity and generative AI work together. Such collaborative creation between human, here the designer and machine, here AI systems can be likened to how air pilots, typically the captain and first officer, are co-piloting the flight - an interaction in which, moreover, the pilots are assisted by an autopilot. An autopilot, however, doesn't replace human pilots but rather allow them to focus on broader aspects of the flight. And so, generative AI does not replace designers but help them generate, refine and modify ideas. In this way, designers, while "letting AI fly for a while" add their unique touch to AI generated outputs while maintaining oversight of the ideation process, similar to how pilots are responsible for critical decision-making, from take-off and landing to situations in between. The interaction, then, between co-piloting and an autopilot, suggests a similar approach to how designers and AI systems can work together which, moreover, may help improve transparency and accountability in AIdeation.

Kafkaesque ideation

Franz Kafka (1883-1924), the writer known for his aversion to noise, joked that a living typist was much less intimidating than a machine: 'A machine with its serious, silent demands strikes me as exercising a greater, more cruel compulsion on one's capacities than any human being.' In Kafka's case, the machine was the typewriter (he claimed he was even afraid of the telephone). Today that machine is the computer. It operates silently but does it make silent demands? While there are those who depreciate the use of the computer for ideation, the fact that you can type a request into a machine, in normal conversational language, and it outputs something close to what you asked for, is pretty remarkable. Yet AI can give users false confidence, giving them the sense that if AI - with access to billions of data points - can come up with new ideas, they must somehow be better. But then ideas have never been in short supply. The problem for most designers, and their clients, is the uncertainty - which ideas are best, which ones are worth investing in? So will human creativity always prevail? But with humans in competition with AI, how can we tell?