From Shakespeare to AI and back

When Polonius asks Hamlet what he is reading, Hamlet's answer is: 'words, words, words'. And so since Shakespeare's days, language, spoken and written, has had a privileged position in Western culture. Indeed both natural language processing, NLP and machine learning, ML, as sub-fields of artificial intelligence, AI, learn from historical datasets by finding patterns and relationships in the data and are widely used in generative artificial intelligence, GenAI. And GenAI models are used both for text-based tasks and text-to-image content, as exemplified by chatbots like GPT4 or by content generators such as Midjourney, which generates images from natural language descriptions known as prompts. When these technologies are combined they complement one another by using NLP’s ability to understand and analyse language and GenAI’s capacity to produce new content. And so both technologies underline language as key to human communication, like in Shakespeare's days. Moreover, AI, as a sub discipline of computer science is transforming the methods and nature of scientific research and its use of language highlights the most crucial aspect of science. That is, the skill to ask the right questions - not from answering known questions, but from asking challenging new questions and questioning previous ideas. The challenge for ideators, then, is to see things in a new and different light. But while ways of seeing may come before words, the use of language, in defining the problem and getting closer to the solution is at the core of design. And so, whether Shakespeare or a present-day designer (in communicating in the context of design), they both turn words. *Cf. Dostoyevsky's psychological exploration of a murderer in Crime and Punishment, his remorse and redemption posed an immense challenge for cinematic rendering, as in the 1935 US film version of the novel: 'as there could be no visual equivalent [for] the author's detailed reasoning and elaborate description of [his characters] mental attitudes'. Baxter, J. 1971. The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg. The International Film Guide Series. A.S Barners & Company, New York.