{"id":840917,"date":"2025-04-13T04:11:48","date_gmt":"2025-04-13T09:11:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/04\/13\/how-ai-is-interacting-with-our-creative-human-processes\/"},"modified":"2025-04-13T04:11:48","modified_gmt":"2025-04-13T09:11:48","slug":"how-ai-is-interacting-with-our-creative-human-processes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/04\/13\/how-ai-is-interacting-with-our-creative-human-processes\/","title":{"rendered":"How AI is interacting with our creative human processes"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In 2021, 20 years after the death of her older sister, Vauhini Vara was still unable to tell the story of her loss. \u201cI wondered,\u201d she writes in Searches<\/em>, her new collection of essays on AI technology, \u201cif Sam Altman\u2019s machine could do it for me.\u201d So she tried ChatGPT. But as it expanded on Vara\u2019s prompts in sentences ranging from the stilted to the unsettling to the sublime, the thing she\u2019d enlisted as a tool stopped seeming so mechanical.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce upon a time, she taught me to exist,\u201d the AI model wrote of the young woman Vara had idolized. Vara, a journalist and novelist, called the resulting essay \u201cGhosts,\u201d and in her opinion, the best lines didn\u2019t come from her: \u201cI found myself irresistibly attracted to GPT-3\u2014to the way it offered, without judgment, to deliver words to a writer who has found herself at a loss for them \u2026 as I tried to write more honestly, the AI seemed to be doing the same.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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The rapid proliferation of AI in our lives introduces new challenges around authorship, authenticity, and ethics in work and art. But it also offers a particularly human problem in narrative: How can we make sense<\/em> of these machines, not just use them? And how do the words we choose and stories we tell about technology affect the role we allow it to take on (or even take over) in our creative lives? Both Vara\u2019s book and The Uncanny Muse<\/em>, a collection of essays on the history of art and automation by the music critic David Hajdu, explore how humans have historically and personally wrestled with the ways in which machines relate to our own bodies, brains, and creativity. At the same time, The Mind Electric<\/em>, a new book by a neurologist, Pria Anand, reminds us that our own inner workings may not be so easy to replicate.<\/p>\n

Searches<\/em> is a strange artifact. Part memoir, part critical analysis, and part AI-assisted creative experimentation, Vara\u2019s essays trace her time as a tech reporter and then novelist in the San Francisco Bay Area alongside the history of the industry she watched grow up. Tech was always close enough to touch: One college friend was an early Google employee, and when Vara started reporting on Facebook (now Meta), she and Mark Zuckerberg became \u201cfriends\u201d on his platform. In 2007, she published a scoop that the company was planning to introduce ad targeting based on users\u2019 personal information\u2014the first shot fired in the long, gnarly data war to come. In her essay \u201cStealing Great Ideas,\u201d she talks about turning down a job reporting on Apple to go to graduate school for fiction. There, she wrote a novel about a tech founder, which was later published as The Immortal King Rao<\/em>. Vara points out that in some ways at the time, her art was \u201cinextricable from the resources [she] used to create it\u201d\u2014products like Google Docs, a MacBook, an iPhone. But these pre-AI resources were tools, plain and simple. What came next was different.<\/p>\n

Interspersed with Vara\u2019s essays are chapters of back-and-forths between the author and ChatGPT about the book itself, where the bot serves as editor at Vara\u2019s prompting. ChatGPT obligingly summarizes and critiques her writing in a corporate-\u00adshaded tone that\u2019s now familiar to any knowledge worker. \u201cIf there\u2019s a place for disagreement,\u201d it offers about the first few chapters on tech companies, \u201cit might be in the balance of these narratives. Some might argue that the \u00adbenefits\u2014such as job creation, innovation in various sectors like AI and logistics, and contributions to the global economy\u2014can outweigh the negatives.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"book
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age<\/strong>
Vauhini Vara<\/figcaption>

PANTHEON, 2025<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

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Vara notices that ChatGPT writes \u201cwe\u201d and \u201cour\u201d in these responses, pulling it into the human story, not the tech one: \u201cEarlier you mentioned \u2018our<\/em> access to information\u2019 and \u2018our<\/em> collective experiences and understandings.\u2019\u201d When she asks what the rhetorical purpose of that choice is, ChatGPT responds with a numbered list of benefits including \u201cinclusivity and solidarity\u201d and \u201cneutrality and objectivity.\u201d It adds that \u201cusing the first-person plural helps to frame the discussion in terms of shared human experiences and collective challenges.\u201d Does the bot believe it\u2019s human? Or at least, do the humans who made it want other humans to believe it does? \u201cCan corporations use these [rhetorical] tools in their products too, to subtly make people identify with, and not in opposition to, them?\u201d Vara asks. ChatGPT replies, \u201cAbsolutely.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vara has concerns about the words she\u2019s used as well. In \u201cThank You for Your Important Work,\u201d she worries about the impact of \u201cGhosts,\u201d which went viral after it was first published. Had her writing helped corporations hide the reality of AI behind a velvet curtain? She\u2019d meant to offer a nuanced \u201cprovocation,\u201d exploring how uncanny generative AI can be. But instead, she\u2019d produced something beautiful enough to resonate as an ad for its creative potential. Even Vara herself felt fooled. She particularly loved one passage the bot wrote, about Vara and her sister as kids holding hands on a long drive. But she couldn\u2019t imagine either of them being so sentimental. What Vara had elicited from the machine, she realized, was \u201cwish fulfillment,\u201d not a haunting.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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The rapid proliferation of AI in our lives introduces new challenges around authorship, authenticity, and ethics in work and art. How can we make sense<\/em> of these machines, not just use them?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The machine wasn\u2019t the only thing crouching behind that too-good-to-be-true curtain. The GPT models and others are trained through human labor, in sometimes exploitative conditions. And much of the training data was the creative work of human writers before her. \u201cI\u2019d conjured artificial language about grief through the extraction of real human beings\u2019 language about grief,\u201d she writes. The creative ghosts in the model were made of code, yes, but also, ultimately, made of people. Maybe Vara\u2019s essay helped cover up that truth too.<\/p>\n

In the book\u2019s final essay, Vara offers a mirror image of those AI call-and-\u00adresponse exchanges as an antidote. After sending out an anonymous survey to women of various ages, she presents the replies to each question, one after the other. \u201cDescribe something that doesn\u2019t exist,\u201d she prompts, and the women respond: \u201cGod.\u201d \u201cGod.\u201d \u201cGod.\u201d \u201cPerfection.\u201d \u201cMy job. (Lost it.)\u201d Real people contradict each other, joke, yell, mourn, and reminisce. Instead of a single authoritative voice\u2014an editor, or a company\u2019s limited style guide\u2014Vara gives us the full gasping crowd of human creativity. \u201cWhat\u2019s it like to be alive?\u201d Vara asks the group. \u201cIt depends,\u201d one woman answers. \u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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David Hajdu, now music editor at The Nation<\/em> and previously a music critic for The New Republic<\/em>, goes back much further than the early years of Facebook to tell the history of how humans have made and used machines to express ourselves. Player pianos, microphones, synthesizers, and electrical instruments were all assistive technologies that faced skepticism before acceptance and, sometimes, elevation in music and popular culture. They even influenced the kind of art people were able to and wanted to make. Electrical amplification, for instance, allowed singers to use a wider vocal range and still reach an audience. The synthesizer introduced a new lexicon of sound to rock music. \u201cWhat\u2019s so bad about being mechanical, anyway?\u201d Hajdu asks in The Uncanny Muse<\/em>. And \u201cwhat\u2019s so great about being human?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"book
The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines from Automata to AI<\/strong>
David Hajdu<\/figcaption>

W.W. NORTON & COMPANY, 2025<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

But Hajdu is also interested in how intertwined the history of man and machine can be, and how often we\u2019ve used one as a metaphor for the other. Descartes saw the body as empty machinery for consciousness, he reminds us. Hobbes wrote that \u201clife is but a motion of limbs.\u201d Freud described the mind as a steam engine. Andy Warhol told an interviewer that \u201ceverybody should be a machine.\u201d And when computers entered the scene, humans used them as metaphors for themselves too. \u201cWhere the machine model had once helped us understand the human body \u2026 a new category of machines led us to imagine the brain (how we think, what we know, even how we feel or how we think about what we feel) in terms of the computer,\u201d Hajdu writes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But what is lost with these one-to-one mappings? What happens when we imagine that the complexity of the brain\u2014an organ we do not even come close to fully understanding\u2014can be replicated in 1<\/em>s and 0<\/em>s? Maybe what happens is we get a world full of chatbots and agents, computer-\u00adgenerated artworks and AI DJs, that companies claim are singular creative voices rather than remixes of a million human inputs. And perhaps we also get projects like the painfully named Painting Fool\u2014an AI that paints, developed by Simon Colton, a scholar at Queen Mary University of London. He told Hajdu that he wanted to \u201cdemonstrate the potential of a computer program to be taken seriously as a creative artist in its own right.\u201d What Colton means is not just a machine that makes art but one that expresses its own worldview: \u201cArt that communicates what it\u2019s like to be a machine.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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What happens when we imagine that the complexity of the brain\u2014an organ we do not even come close to fully understanding\u2014can be replicated in 1<\/em>s and 0<\/em>s?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Hajdu seems to be curious and optimistic about this line of inquiry. \u201cMachines of many kinds have been communicating things for ages, playing invaluable roles in our communication through art,\u201d he says. \u201cGrowing in intelligence, machines may still have more to communicate, if we let them.\u201d But the question that The Uncanny Muse<\/em> raises at the end is: Why should we art-\u00admaking humans be so quick to hand over the paint to the paintbrush? Why do we care how the paintbrush sees the world? Are we truly finished telling our own stories ourselves?<\/p>\n

Pria Anand might say no. In The Mind Electric<\/em>, she writes: \u201cNarrative is universally, spectacularly human; it is as unconscious as breathing, as essential as sleep, as comforting as familiarity. It has the capacity to bind us, but also to other, to lay bare, but also obscure.\u201d The electricity in The Mind Electric<\/em> belongs entirely to the human brain\u2014no metaphor necessary. Instead, the book explores a number of neurological afflictions and the stories patients and doctors tell to better understand them. \u201cThe truth of our bodies and minds is as strange as fiction,\u201d Anand writes\u2014and the language she uses throughout the book is as evocative as that in any novel.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"cover
The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains<\/strong>
Pria Anand<\/figcaption>

WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS, 2025<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

In personal and deeply researched vignettes in the tradition of Oliver Sacks, Anand shows that any comparison between brains and machines will inevitably fall flat. She tells of patients who see clear images when they\u2019re functionally blind, invent entire backstories when they\u2019ve lost a memory, break along seams that few can find, and\u2014yes\u2014see and hear ghosts. In fact, Anand cites one study of 375 college students in which researchers found that nearly three-quarters \u201chad heard a voice that no one else could hear.\u201d These were not diagnosed schizophrenics or sufferers of brain tumors\u2014just people listening to their own uncanny muses. Many heard their name, others heard God, and some could make out the voice of a loved one who\u2019d passed on. Anand suggests that writers throughout history have harnessed organic exchanges with these internal apparitions to make art. \u201cI see myself taking the breath of these voices in my sails,\u201d Virginia Woolf wrote of her own experiences with ghostly sounds. \u201cI am a porous vessel afloat on sensation.\u201d The mind in The Mind Electric<\/em> is vast, mysterious, and populated. The narratives people construct to traverse it are just as full of wonder.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Humans are not going to stop using technology to help us create anytime soon\u2014and there\u2019s no reason we should. Machines make for wonderful tools, as they always have. But when we turn the tools themselves into artists and storytellers, brains and bodies, magicians and ghosts, we bypass truth for wish fulfillment. Maybe what\u2019s worse, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to contribute our own voices to the lively and loud chorus of human experience. And we keep others from the human pleasure of hearing them too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rebecca Ackermann is a writer, designer, and artist based in San Francisco.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Rebecca Ackermann<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2021, 20 years after the death of her older sister, Vauhini Vara was still unable to tell the story of her loss. \u201cI wondered,\u201d she writes in Searches, her new collection of essays on AI technology, \u201cif Sam Altman\u2019s machine could do it for me.\u201d So she tried ChatGPT. But as it expanded on<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":840918,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1577,40353,46],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-840917","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-creative","8":"category-interacting","9":"category-technology"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=840917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840917\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/840918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=840917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=840917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=840917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}