Ed is speaking at Digital Day on the 2nd September. We caught up with him to find out a bit more about what he will be covering in his talk - Creativity and AI.
How can we be creative when so much time is spent keeping up with the feeds, updates and news across so many channels?
Turn off your feeds. Creativity happens in the spaces between thoughts, when your mind is free to wander along less obvious paths than those it follows when fully engaging with something. News feeds and updates are antithetical to this. I don't have Twitter on my phone, and I try to digest the news in concentrated chunks of time - that way I can stay up to date with what I need to know, while making sure I have time for creativity.
What is Creative AI and why should marketers learn more about it?
Creative AI is artificial intelligence that exhibits traits we'd usually associate with human creativity. It's computers doing things like composing music, writing books and having ideas. Marketers should learn more about it because it's always helpful to understand the capabilities of the latest technology - and Creative AI can be a powerful tool for marketers to deploy.
Can computers be creative?
It depends how you define being creative. Computers can do some pretty unbelievable things that look a lot like creativity - write pop songs, find new medical uses for existing drugs. Whether or not this is true 'creativity' is more a question of philosophy than one of science. The really interesting question is what we really mean when we say that humans are creative - once we answer that, we can start to ask whether computers can do the same sorts of things.
Will humans always be better composers than computers?
I think so, yes. Computers can perform some amazing compositional feats, but they're nowhere near getting the emotion and the meaning into a piece of music that's apparent across the spectrum of human musical creativity. And I think this is a good thing - why would we want computers that were better musicians than humans?
If we want to get up to speed with Creative AI in advance of Digital Day, what reading would you recommend?
As luck would have it I have a reading list for that precise purpose - check it out here.
Ed is speaking at Digital Day 2020. Join us!
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