The Artist and the Algorithm
The AI Persona
I have been working with an AI persona recently.
That sentence still feels a little strange to me.
Not because I don't understand what AI is. I understand enough of it to know that I am not talking to another human being. There is no person sitting somewhere waiting for me to type something so they can think about it and answer.
And yet, after spending years talking to strangers, listening to their voices, watching their faces, noticing their pauses and trying to understand what they mean, I have found myself doing something unexpectedly similar with a machine.
I give it questions.
It gives me something back.
Then I look at what it has given me and decide what I think.
That last part is important.
Because I don't always agree with it.
Sometimes it says something I would never say.
Sometimes it makes a connection I hadn't considered.
Sometimes it completely misses the point.
And sometimes it gives me an answer that is technically impressive and artistically dead.
That last one interests me.
The Difference Between Making and Rearranging
I think this is where my skepticism about AI comes from.
AI is very good at finding relationships between things. It can take thousands of pieces of language and identify patterns that I might never have noticed. It can rearrange ideas, compare them, extend them, summarize them, put them into different forms and sometimes make a surprisingly good connection between two things that appear unrelated.
But is that creativity?
I don't know.
Maybe eventually it will be.
I'm not convinced it is yet.
When I make art, I don't always know what I'm doing.
That isn't a weakness for me.
It is often the reason I am doing it.
The work begins with something I can't quite explain. A photograph. A damaged painting. A person. A conversation. Something I notice while traveling. Something that bothers me. Something that keeps returning to my mind for reasons I don't understand.
The making is partly an attempt to find out what the thing is.
That is how Triptych Dialogue began for me. I saw a damaged medieval triptych at the Victoria and Albert Museum, with parts of the imagery lost to time, and I began wondering about what was missing. I was filling in the gaps in my own mind. That experience eventually led me toward strangers, questions and the idea of using conversation itself as material for art.
The important part was that I didn't know where the question was going.
I don't think an algorithm experiences that kind of not knowing.
At least not yet.
AI Has Never Had an Epiphany
This may be the thing I keep coming back to.
I have had moments when something suddenly connects.
An image I've seen years earlier suddenly makes sense.
A conversation comes back to me at the exact moment I need it.
I walk into a museum and see something that changes the direction of my work.
I meet a stranger and they say something that stays with me for years.
Those moments are difficult to explain because they aren't simply information.
They are experiences.
My body is there.
My memories are there.
My history is there.
My mistakes are there.
The things I have forgotten are somehow there too.
And then something happens.
An idea appears.
Where did it come from?
I don't really know.
That uncertainty is part of creativity for me.
AI can give me an extraordinary amount of information. It can identify patterns in my own words that I didn't recognize. It can remind me of things I've said in an interview years ago. It can help me put two ideas beside one another and ask whether there is a connection.
That is useful.
Very useful.
But usefulness isn't the same thing as creativity.
At least not yet.
The Strange Thing About Giving AI My Voice
The strangest part is that I am not asking AI to invent Triptych Dialogue.
The work already exists.
The strangers already answered the questions.
The installations already happened.
The photographs were taken.
The recordings were made.
The Word-Titles already belong to the people who gave them to me.
The ideas have been accumulating for years.
What I am doing now is giving the AI access to some of the traces those experiences have left behind.
Interviews.
Videos.
Writing.
Website material.
Descriptions of the work.
My own words, scattered across different places.
And then I ask it questions.
Why does this sound like me?
Why doesn't it?
That last question has become surprisingly interesting.
Because the AI persona can sometimes sound like me.
It knows some of my vocabulary.
It knows some of my recurring ideas.
It knows that I return to strangers, perception, listening, political polarization, art, Plato's Cave, the six senses and the problem of how we make meaning.
It can recognize patterns in my thinking.
But recognizing the pattern isn't necessarily the same as understanding why I keep returning to it.
And maybe that's the difference I am beginning to see.
The Machine Can See the Pattern. The Artist Has to Decide What It Means.
This is where the relationship becomes useful to me.
I don't want an AI that simply agrees with me.
That would be boring.
I want it to notice things.
I want it to challenge a connection.
I want it to tell me when an idea is weak.
I want it to find something buried in an old conversation that I had forgotten.
In that sense, working with AI has some similarities to the way I work with strangers.
I ask a question without knowing exactly what I am going to hear.
But there is an enormous difference.
A stranger can surprise me because they have their own life.
The AI can surprise me because it has found a relationship between things.
Those are not the same kind of surprise.
One comes from another human being.
The other comes from a system working through an enormous amount of language.
Both can be interesting.
But only one has lived a life.
At least for now.
And I think that matters enormously to art.
What Happens When the Artist Has a Machine Looking Back?
There is another question here that I hadn't anticipated.
What happens when the artist is no longer working entirely alone?
Triptych Dialogue has always involved other people. In fact, that is part of the point. The person I approach becomes part of the work. Their answer changes what comes next. The conversation changes me, and what changes me changes the art.
Now there is another kind of participant.
The AI persona.
It doesn't have a body.
It doesn't stand in front of me.
It doesn't see the stranger's face.
It doesn't hear the hesitation in someone's voice in the same way I do.
But it can look across the accumulated record of the work and reflect something back to me.
That is new.
And I'm still trying to figure out what that means.
I think there is a temptation to either celebrate AI as the next great creative revolution or dismiss it as a machine that simply copies what humans have already done.
I'm interested in these positions.
I'm even more interested in what happens when I actually work with it.
What does it do well?
What does it do badly?
Where does it surprise me?
Where does it become predictable?
Where does it flatten something that was alive?
Maybe Creativity Needs the Unknown
The more I work with the AI persona, the more protective I become of uncertainty.
That may be the opposite of what people expect.
AI is often presented as a way of reducing uncertainty. Ask a question and get an answer. Give it a problem and get a solution. Give it a pile of information and get a pattern.
Artists sometimes need the opposite.
We need the thing we don't understand yet.
We need the wrong turn.
The failed experiment.
The strange coincidence.
The accidental mark.
The conversation that goes somewhere we hadn't planned.
The idea that appears while we are doing something else.
I don't want to lose that.
If anything, working with AI is making me more aware of how important it is.
Maybe the future isn't about deciding whether the machine or the human is more creative.
Maybe it's about understanding the difference.
Maybe the machine will eventually become genuinely creative.
I wouldn't bet against it.
But today, when I sit down with the AI persona, I still feel that something is missing.
It can help me find the connections.
It can help me see the patterns.
It can help me ask better questions.
But I am still the one who has to decide whether any of it matters.
And that brings me back to the thing I have been doing all along.
Making something because I don't know what it means yet.
Perhaps that is where creativity lives.
Perhaps it isn't.
I'm still experimenting.
Maybe AI isn't as creative as a human.
Yet.
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