Fringe ideas

In her book An Anatomy of Inspiration Rosamund Harding (1898-1982), an English musical scholar, sets out to reverse-engineer the mechanisms of creativity through the direct experiences of famous creators across art, science, and literature. In so doing, Harding finds common threads of creativity emphasising its combinatorial nature and its reliance on eclectic knowledge. She holds: 'Originality depends on new and striking combinations of ideas. It is obvious therefore that the more a man knows the greater scope he has for arriving at striking combinations.' Harding continues: ' Success depends on adequate knowledge: that is, it depends on sufficient knowledge of the special subject, and a variety of extraneous knowledge to produce new and original combinations of ideas.' Moreover, she writes: 'The variety of interests tends to increase the richness of these extra ideas — ‘fringe-ideas’ — associated with the subject and thus to increase the possibilities of new and original combinations of thought'. Harding's findings suggest support for knowledge-based ideation while debunking the genius-myth of creativity*. That is, in-born creative ability is not enough by itself without a solid foundation of knowledge obtained by experience or study. But more than this, in the age of artificial intelligence, designers draw inspiration from a raft of genAI applications, such as Dall-E, which, given their combinatorial nature, help produce what Harding calls 'fringe ideas'. *Research trends, originally outlined by Graham Wallace (1926) suggest five major stages of creativity: Preparation (idea generation), Incubation (gestation period), Illumination (the "Aha! moment"), Evaluation (idea development) and Verification (idea communication).

The idea of Now

The concept of now represents the inevitability of transience - the relationship between space and time - a kind of fleeting sense of reality. The space-time reference point of now suggests both spatial and temporal uncertainty as well as subjective experience. That is, the concept is not absolute but is relative to the observer's frame of experience. Yet defining the true nature of now takes on elusive yet provocative and fruitful associations. It has crossed cultures and civilisations, people and places, and countless interpretations have been proposed, as exemplified by Buddhist impermanence, the ‘feeling of things’ of Japanese aesthetics or Picasso's verdict that 'If a work of art does not live in the present it does not live'. The transitory essence of now suggests that ideation is an agent for continuous change where the idea is in the present time or moment yet related to the past pointing to the future. This also suggests that the ideation process can be viewed through a philosophical lens, say, of the ontology of being and becoming, or Hegel's view that everything is in a process of change. And Heraclitus noted the endless flux of existence: 'It is not possible to step twice into the same river.'

GenAI as spectacle

Generative AI enables machines to produce content that appears to mimic human-like creativity. As such GenAI models, as tools are great creative assistants. But while GenAI models excel at mimicking human-like responses, they lack genuine comprehension. That is, GenAI models use complex mathematical and statistical methods to generate responses that appear intelligent but lack genuine understanding or reasoning. The illusion of understanding means that GenAI output is surface, or representation without any deep contextual understanding, as experienced on social media platforms such as Instagram or Copilot. To better grasp the concepts of semantic understanding, reasoning and appearance of GenAI, a philosophical interpretation may help. For example, Guy Debord  (1931-1994), an arch-critic of consumerism and theorist of The society of the Spectacle (1967) - elaborates a system of social relations mediated by images where the totality of social relations becomes mediated by appearances. That is, experience of events is replaced by a passive contemplation of images (which are determined by other people) exemplified by the culture of advertising, consumption, and celebrity. Debord's term spectacle has become widely used for the modern condition. GenAI, then, through Debord's lens of a world mediated by images, may become the new social spectacle. The spectacle, moreover, evokes differences between appearance and reality. Shakespeare's Macbeth, for example, demonstrates how appearances cannot be trusted because they are moldable, meaning they offer no insight into the reality of a person. As spectacle, then, GenAI may alter perceptions of visual representations whereby appearances are based on copies instead of the original, or copies without the original.