Whenever I start to feel particularly worried about emerging cultural and political shifts, I invite inspiring creative innovators to gather and talk things out. Sitting alone, in front of my computer, and questioning a chatbot won’t help move me forward. AI can only generate what’s already been thought, so as a tool, it’s fairly useless in this context. And creative breakthroughs are more likely to happen in social settings.

Of course, simply entering a social situation doesn’t, on its own, lead to noticeable outcomes. There’s work that needs to be done.

I’ve written before about some of the principles behind successful co-creation: You need to come to the discussion table in a mental paradigm of equals, regardless of any hierarchies that may already exist in other contexts; all participants must be in a constant state of engagement, listening with the same intensity as speaking, ready to get challenged and confronted, and not allowed to stay passive; and, perhaps most importantly, creative discussions must be built on the language of friendship. The path to creativity involves finding some creative folks, inviting them to sit with you and absorb the current reality, talking honestly about how we are messing up, and then going with the flow of whatever comes next.

Time to Gather

Tying creativity to the social may seem strange to some. Many of us have been trained to believe that breakthrough moments come only when we are isolated in analytical thought.

But it’s not true. We think better by doing. We learn more about the essence of who we are when we get new information from those around us, by developing empathy and understanding how our intentions affect others, and from the clarity that emerges when we are forced to explain ourselves to others.

The challenge weighing on me as of late is the growing sense that AI and algorithmic thinking are encroaching on key areas of our social, professional, and creative lives. So last week, we gathered a group of really creative people together in San Francisco for a thought-provoking panel on strategies for empowering creativity in these challenging times.

We were curious about how to keep creating amidst the chaos of AI-induced uncertainty, what might bolster our confidence to take creative risks, and why it is still so important to gather in physical artful spaces, embodied human to embodied human. For those who weren’t there, I hope to share some of the highlights.

Brains Are Not Meat-Based Computers

Algorithmic supremacists like to describe our brains as if they were meat-based computers. Working from this perspective, researchers designed a type of AI built on a neural net model of computing, which mimics their (incorrect) understanding of how our brains operate.

When an AI “thinks,” it uses hardware built on interconnected neurons in a layered structure. But researchers in other fields have been demonstrating for decades that human thinking is not restricted to the activity of the neural system in the brain. There are neuroanatomical explanations for why the body and the mind aren’t separate or separable, and how the mind-body dualism at the heart of this belief is simply not compatible with contemporary neuroscience.

One of our panelists, Holly Bowling, is an artist who defies convention and labels, a virtuoso pianist with her own musical voice. She walked us through why anyone who has ever engaged in live improvisational music knows that we are not meat-based computers, explaining how the physical side of improvising requires putting in thousands of hours to get fluidity with your instrument so that “you can just get out of the way. All those hours of practice are about removing barriers.”

When an improvisation is really working, Holly explains that “the thing that we are chasing, as listeners and as performers, is getting into that flow state and not thinking anymore… You feel it as a performer. The people listening feel it. The bits and pieces that you’ve collected from other sources, and all the hours that you put in, are just giving you the ingredients you need to let this other thing happen. It’s not a meat computer doing that. It’s uniquely human.”

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Get Uncomfortable

Another panelist, Reed Mathis, is an innovative composer, virtuoso soloist, and host of The Gifts of Improvising podcast. He warned that when you are improvising, if you attempt to play from your brain, the creative output will only appeal to other musicians. But “if you want to play to a roomful of nonmusicians, you have to play from your body… that’s what you have in common with them.”

This is why AI output is not art. It’s algorithm-based, not embodied creativity. He went on to note that an algorithm “seeks to please the customer. What does Reed want? Give it to him. Period. End of transaction. To experience human art, you have to join with other people.”

So why are companies positioning AI as a creative tool? Reed laments that “it seems we are doing it to eliminate boredom, to eliminate struggle, to eliminate awkwardness, to eliminate what the Buddha identified as what is uncomfortable in existence… Humans don’t have a great track record of undoing convenience. It seems we just can’t override this desire to make things easy.”

This was a point that our third panelist, Andy Horwitz, a writer, cultural programmer, and founder of Culturebot.org, wanted to jump in on. “User-interfaces are designed to provide friction-free experiences. But do you really want a friction-free experience? Friction has benefits… In learning, isn’t friction between you and your learning partner the key to discovery? I see in my students a discomfort with not knowing. But not knowing is where learning happens.”

Indeed. If we want to stay creative, we need to embrace the discomfort, the dissonance, and the unknown. But to turn these feelings into something beautiful, something that an AI cannot replicate, we need to gather in artful spaces. There’s no algorithm for creativity, but co-creation in social settings born of a paradigm of equality, constant engagement, and friendship can open up a flow of creativity that will surprise all participants.