(2021-11-16) Ai As A Creative Collaborator Thesephistcom

Linus Lee: AI as a creative collaborator. I spent the last couple of months delving deeper into how I could integrate elements of modern machine learning with my love of building personal knowledge tools. (Tools for Thought)

One open question for me is how exactly human users should interact with AI integrated into knowledge tools and creative tools.

I’m finding it helpful to draw a spectrum from AI being used as a tool to AI being treated like a collaborator in our workflows.

AI as a tool

In this model, the human calls on the AI to improve or enhance a thing they’re trying to achieve, in very specific, well-defined ways.

In marketing speak, this might be called “Smart X”. e.g. “Smart erase” to automatically clean up a photo in a photo editor

AI as a collaborator (centaur)

With this approach of integrating AI into our creative workflows, the AI is always subordinate to human users. It has no agency but that which is granted exactly and literally by the human operator.

In this model, the human and the AI are two independent, autonomous agents at equal level of engagement with the work being produced

The collaboration is much more organic, and there’s a constant feedback loop informing both participants about the ever-changing creative direction.

I could imagine a world where photo editors, writing apps, note-taking apps, and IDEs all have collaborator-style AI built in that you can turn on for it to lurk in the background and chime in here or there with suggestions

The collaborator model has two benefits:

It dramatically opens up the potential capabilities of AI built into our tools

The fact that AI interacts with the tool and the human creator using the same mechanics familiar to the user already means there are no new interaction mechanics for the user to learn

The “type-ahead” suggestions we’re starting to see in Google Docs and Gmail is an imperfect example of the collaborator model of AI. Rather than having a “complete the sentence” button in a right-click menu, the AI “types ahead” in little grey letters

Obviously, the reality is that there are many features and ideas that will fall somewhere in between these two archetypes. But I think this spectrum is a useful tool to help us imagine interesting ways we can design AI into our creative tools.