The Grammar of Human-AI Co-Creation
Human-AI co-creativity forms a new wave of creation.
Automated and digitized tools, no longer mere whims for humans to toy with, transform into machines that organically engage us. OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4.0 lays this transformation bare in its latest iteration, demonstrating a conversant and free flowing voice interface. Out of automation emerges a new role that AI plays as a synthetic, interactive entity. To prevent ourselves from reaching a state of inactive inertia alongside AI, we humans need to nurture our creative center to flourish.
AI poses many implications for design. It permeates the design process, from research and content generation to ideation and storytelling. As mystifying as it is, AI’s reliance on trained data-sets reveals an agility in regurgitating humanity’s vast data repository, but also an ineptitude in synchronizing between mind and body like we have over our creative process. One tool, Drawing Apprentice (Kim, J. et al., 2021), visually supplements rather than replaces ideation by responding to the designer’s own sketches first. Here, the locus of creativity is generated through human input rather than AI. Drawing Apprentice and other tools like it unearth an opportunity for us: to partner with AI, who can assist with clerical and administrative tasks, leaving us ample room to lean into intuition and generative play.
There is an extent to which we ought to engage with AI to relegate and co-generate creativity. An ethical question extends into the nebulous landscape of human-AI call and response. Speculative design arises as one potential answer. A future-oriented methodology, speculative design empowers us to envision possible scenarios to help germinate and action the present. It applies to value-based questions exploring the desirability of artificial intelligence, and bigger existential questions like climate change and geopolitical strife that threaten our existence.
Speculative design harnesses scenarios to achieve ideal futures. It considers multiple mediums to diverge and converge the design process beyond traditional means. Because technology is unlocking innovation quicker than we can grasp, grounding research and design principles in embodied experiences and cerebral values refocuses our sights away from siloed, product-driven timelines. Instead, we peer through a kaleidoscopic lens that sees literature, art, music, and performance as means to fertilize both a pragmatic and humane design methodology.
Consider what the grammar of speculative design could be. Deconstructing human-centered design can help build a foundation for speculation. It might be imbuing the interrogative mood into tools that question the validity of AI responses. Designing a future perfect tense to scaffold workflows we plan to share with AI. Interweaving storytelling with the skein of semantics to prioritize human creative output. Rooting the human-AI partnership in the syntax of enacted human experiences.
In the wake of AI, human-centered design loses its potency. Human-centered design diminishes as AI’s functionality bridges itself to humanity. Post-humanism posits a more promising perspective through integration as it seeks to reconcile the ambiguity of the amorphous AI computer to the tangible world. As our partnership with AI advances, so too will the nuances of our relationship. To design for this transition, we can envision a preferred scenario that bridges the values we want in the world-centered future to inform a better present.
For us, futures are not a destination or something to be strived for but a medium to aid imaginative thought—to speculate with.
I fixated on this quote from Speculative Everything. It resonates with a future conceived of as a medium for practical imagination rather than as a limiting, manufactured time frame. Speculative design reverses siloed design linearity, obsolesces constrictive design frameworks, retrieves stories, philosophy, art, and literature, and enhances design thinking and practice to augment a process that complements our partnership with AI. Through it, we will embed the stories that matter into the arc of our co-generated technological journey.
Bibliography
Chakrabarty, P. “The Basics You Need to Know and Understand about Speculative Design.” Medium, January 2023, UX Planet. https://uxplanet.org/the-basics-you-need-to-know-and-understand-about-speculative-design-8a8bf5be4162
Dunne, A. et. al. “Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming.” The MIT Press, December 2013.
Faste, Haakon. “A Post-Human World is Coming. Design Has Never Mattered More.” Fast Company, May 2016, https://www.fastcompany.com/3060742/a-post-human-world-is-coming-design-has-never-mattered-more
Huta, Veronika. “Meaning as a Subjective Experience.” Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 30(1), 20-25, Routledge, 2016.
Kim, J. et. al. “Collaborative Ideation Partner: Design Ideation in Human-AI Co-creativity.” Science and Technology publications, 2021, chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.scitepress.org/PublishedPapers/2021/106408/106408.pdf.
Ko, Amy J. et. al. “Pointing.” University of Washington, n,d., https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/books/user-interface-software-and-technology/pointing?word=areas
