Seeing AI as a collaborator, not a creator

The reason you read this message from me today is that I felt bored 30 years ago.

I felt bored and curious about the world, so I finished spending a lot of time at the university computer laboratory, wandering in Usnet and early World Wide, and I am looking for interesting things to read. Soon after I was not satisfied with reading things on the Internet – I wanted to make them. So I learned HTML and made a basic web page, then a better web page, then a complete web site full of web things. Then I kept going from there. This amateur group of web pages led to training in the press with an online magazine arm that has only little attention to what we obsessed with the web. This led to my first job in the press, then another, and in the end, in the end this Press function.

But none of this was possible if I did not feel bored and curious. And more to this point: my curiosity about technology.

The university computer laboratory may appear initially like an unlikely creative center. We tend to think about creativity as taking place more in the studio or book workshop. But throughout history, often our greatest creative leaps – and I would like to claim that the web and its grandchildren represented one like jump – was due to progress in technology.

There are great easy examples, such as photography or printing printing, but this is also true for all types of creative inventions that we often consider to be rejected. Oil paints. Theaters. Musical degrees. Electric combinations! Almost anywhere you look at the arts, and possibly out of pure sound, technology played a role.

But the key to technical achievement was never the same technology. It was the way the artists were applied to express our humanity. Think about the way we are talking about the arts. We often complete it with words that indicate our humanity, like spiritand heartAnd life; We often criticize it with descriptions like Sterileand clinicalOr Without life. (Certainly, you can love a sterile art piece, but this is usually the artist tends to be sterile to clarify a point on humanity!)

All this means that I believe that artificial intelligence can be, and it will actually be a tool for creative expression, but this real art will always be something directed by human creativity, not machines.

I can be wrong. I hope.

This issue, which has been fully produced by humans who use computers, explores creativity and tension between the artist and technology. You can see it on our cover that Tom Hoperston explains, and read about it in stories from James Odonel, Will Douglas Heef, Rebecca Akraman, Michelle Kim, Bian Garderner, and Alison Arif.

However, of course, creativity is more than just the arts. All human progress stems from creativity, because creativity is how to solve problems. So it was important for us to provide you with accounts as well. You will find those in stories from Carrie Klein, Carly Kai, Matthew Bensford and Robin George Andrews. (If you want to know how we can nick asteroid, this is the problem for you!)

We are also trying to get more creativity ourselves. Over the next few issues, you will notice some changes that come to this magazine with the addition of some new regular elements (see 3 things for Caiwei Chen for one example). Among these changes, we plan to seek and publish more reader notes regularly and answer questions that you may have about technology. We invite you to create creativity and send an email to us: newsroom@technologyreview.com.

As always, thanks for reading.

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2025-04-23 09:00:00