by JCM | 26 Dec, 2019 | Narratives & Meanings
Using the Christmas break to catch up on a backlog of reading, and this passage on how reading inspires creativity (because innovative ideas are usually derivatives with enhancements) is the perfect reminder of why I should do this more often:
“When you read you might hear voices of the dead that make your hair stand on end, or that trigger in you a thought analogous to the founding thought and prompt you to write a response that grows from the times you live in, and differs from the earlier text simply because times and thinking and words have changed… You may see new things in the earlier text, and so give something back to it.”
Want to be more creative in the new year? Read more. Watch more. Listen more. Consume more. Because the greater the range of sources of inspiration you expose yourself to, the more varied and interesting your output.
Do “what the best poets do, trying to think *behind* the words… whether those words come from a newspaper, from an essay, from a hubbub on the street…”
A good new year’s resolution, that: Think *behind* the words.
by JCM | 19 Dec, 2019 | Systems & Technology
Everyone’s going to be sharing this NYT piece on location data – and rightly so. Scary stuff, with some superb journalism backed up with excellent presentation that should make the telecoms, tech and advertising industries (as well as regulators) all take a good hard look at themselves.
But the real challenge (and huge opportunity) is finding ways to enable safe sharing of this kind of data without impeaching on privacy or personal security. Because – even anonymised – this kind of data can lead to insanely useful insight that goes far, far beyond serving up targeted advertising:
“Researchers can use the raw data to provide key insights for transportation studies and government planners. The City Council of Portland, Ore., unanimously approved a deal to study traffic and transit by monitoring millions of cellphones. Unicef announced a plan to use aggregated mobile location data to study epidemics, natural disasters and demographics.”
This isn’t a problem with the concept of location tracking. It’s a problem with the execution.
by JCM | 7 Dec, 2019 | Systems & Technology
“In the future, we can expect computers to produce literature different from anything we could possibly conceive of” – fascinating piece about the still nascent art of AI creativity, this.
There’s nothing to overly worry us human creatives so far, based on the examples on show here – unless you’re a fan of surrealism and the avant garde, that is… Still, there’s a lot of promise. After all, “A machine that can caption images is a machine that can describe or relate to what it sees in a highly intelligent way.” Give this tech time, and it will get more sophisticated, and harder to tell from human creative.
The potential to use AI to reinterpret disparate inputs into new creative forms – poems based on images, an experimental novel based on the inputs of GPS from a road trip – is definitely the kind of thing to get creative directors’ creative juices flowing. AI can already write, paint, compose music and create photo-realistic images. How can we deploy it to boost human creativity?
Most brands know what they look like, what their tone of voice is. If you could programme an interpretative AI with your brand’s key attributes and ask it to reinterpret the world around it, what would the results be?
The answer might be meaningless nonsense, but it sure would be fun to find out.
