Artificial intelligence is making a remarkable entry into the communication environment. Here is a weak signal that suddenly interrupts us. Something is happening.

The subject immediately makes me think of the many attempts to define what is unique to humans in comparison to animals. It was thought that the creation and use of tools could be the decisive marker of our humanity. And we have discovered that birds, ants, chimpanzees, otters... could also create and use them. It was thought that it could be laughter. However, it turns out that certain primates are sensitive to a form of humor. Emotions? No, animals are social and sensitive. They express their affection or their suffering in many ways. So what remains? Spirituality, the freedom to extricate oneself from the natural flow, or creativity.

However, here comes artificial intelligence to compete with us in creativity. We who pride ourselves on practicing a creative profession, at Nouvelle Vague and elsewhere, are taken aback to see that a digital system, maybe tomorrow’s quantum system, based on algorithms, can approach our creative faculty.

What do we mean by creative faculty? It is, in my opinion, our faculty to first represent the world and then to interpret it.

Following Arthur Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation, I believe that we do not represent the world in itself, as it is in all its dimensions, but as we see it, with the eyes of our subjectivity, our history, or even our emotions and our culture. We represent what is given to us in space and time and produce signs that allow us to understand each other and communicate about it.

Starting from these representations that could be described as mundane or common without being pejorative, we can make an additional effort to refigure the real: it is then a creative exercise. The art of highlighting, adding mystery or depth, the art of making objects, events, or people beautiful, aesthetic, or even sublime. It can also be, as in any narrative, the art of making sense of scattered and chaotic events. An additional layer is then added to the common representation, a layer of artistic and narrative interpretation, which refigures and rearranges the common representations into new representations that provide meaning: enlightened representations for journalism, desirable and attractive for advertising, questioning for art.

Each gaze adds to the spontaneous representation that is always already cultural, let’s agree on that at least, a new interpretation that revisits the real. Journalistic reporting educates us, advertising surprises or moves us, the narrative provides meaning to real or fictitious events, art confounds us, astonishes us, plunges us into an abyss of questions.

To summarize: we represent the “real” world with the eyes of our culture. We interpret it from the angle of our gaze:

• either a journalistic and realistic angle that aims to report on the real,

• or an advertising angle that navigates between the real and the imaginary, with the ambition of capturing attention, seducing, and convincing,

• or a narrative angle, which adds meaning by connecting chaotic data,

• or an imaginary angle freed from the common adjustment to the real, which aims to move our souls, to push our minds to question themselves.

In advertising, storytelling, and art, three activities with different and sometimes convergent goals, the imaginary interpretation adds an element of artifice. An artificial dimension in the sense that it is produced by humans. In contrast to natural, which is produced by nature. Let’s understand that by artificial, we do not retain the meaning of something that would not comply with reality and would lack nature.

We come to the point: does artificial intelligence compete with human actions that themselves involve an artificial layer?

The answer is yes, simply on the basis of logical reasoning. Algorithms are produced by humans. They are therefore artificial. Algorithms are designed to mimic the human capacity to add an artificial layer to the world, ultimately to represent and interpret it.

Now that we have agreed on the meaning of words and things: can we co-create with an AI?

Certainly yes. There is no reason to think otherwise. Artificial intelligence, mimicking the human faculty of adding artifice to the raw data of the world, also adds a part of artifice through the guided process of the algorithm. Artificial intelligence is capable of artifice, just as human intelligence is capable of it.

Let’s pause for a moment on the word “artifice” before observing the tests. (Cf. Le Robert. Historical Dictionary of the French Language by the brilliant Alain Rey and his team)
Artifice comes from the Indo-European “ars” whose semantic field is related to the upper arm and shoulder, to human deed in general, to manners, to the faculty of putting things in order, articulating, arranging. This connects this root to arithmetic, numbers on one side and on the other to skill, talent, and art up to artifice (artificium) which evokes technique but also cunning, hence the sense of a deceptive artificial in the end.

We could discuss for a whole year the troubling history of this word that connects the shoulder, the free arm of man, to order, number, and art. As if the transition from human intelligence to artificial intelligence was inscribed from the beginning.

Our artifices can be clear and readable as much as they can be crazy and mystical. Reason and madness are our lot. I suppose this should also be the case for artificial intelligence. Let’s test.

GPT-3 Tests

I focused on the artificial intelligence's ability to produce meaning from a few words, or a beginning of a sentence or a message with meaning, with a good dose of French, but not only.

It’s a real surprise. Artificial intelligence explores possibilities as my brain might do. The idea is not to compare what you would have produced from the same data with the AI's output. I primarily note that something has been produced.

From 4 words, AI weaves a story and suggests a website that doesn’t exist. This story doesn’t interest me, but I am impressed by the something produced from almost nothing.

Four new words and the AI derails. A feeling of being at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Uncontrollable. Madness of AI. I pray never to be governed by AI. No one can swear that no bug will occur.

Second chance: 4 new words in “harmony” that could inspire. Ouch! That derails hard... my AI worries me.

Let’s change method. A simple idea converted into a micro-story. One thing surprises me: the ability of AI to connect the feeling of well-being with the ability to “make a difference in the world.” It’s a thought that has been added.

The beginning of a pitch turns into a true narrative. A boring turnip but that respects the basic rules of narrative: a beginning, a development, an end.

A simple suggestion... a short response. Oh oh oh my AI is tired. It can really do better.

Second to last attempt. A sentence whose meaning is not so obvious. AI makes the right deduction. The proposal is poetic. AI's deduction is logical. If this man belongs to his landscape, it is because he has lived his whole life in this village.

So, can an AI be creative?

It is by nature.
The nature of artificial intelligence is to be creative. It mimics the ability of humans to be so. It is artificial. Therefore it is creative.

Will AI be your new colleague?

I believe it will impose itself as a supplementary colleague. We will use its exploratory power without cutting off our own. It can help us connect ideas, relate representations we wouldn't have thought of. It will integrate into our ideation process just as the smartphone has become our sixth sense. Sometimes we will find it brilliant, other times stupid, completely crazy, or just too reasonable.

Sometimes we will plug it in. Other times we will unplug it.

I want to tell you: everything is fine as long as we can still unplug it.