Computers and Creativity · Molly Mielke

Our interfaces should facilitate prose-sculpting, meaning-architecting, memory-augmenting, and inspiration-harvesting—all grounded in sources we love and trust. Just as calculators shifted math from rote computation to conceptual exploration, AI can nudge creative work toward the things humans are uniquely good at: thinking and feeling deeply.

As calculators shifted math from rote computation to conceptual exploration, AI nudges creativity towards the uniquely human - the emotional, the ethical, the culturally resonant. It’s not a duel at dawn with paintbrushes or pianos but a partnership, with AI as the trusty sidekick, expanding the canvas of human expression.

For creatives, it’s import... See more

Can artificial intelligence help us to be creative? That’s the important question, and it’s a question about user interfaces, not about who has the biggest model.

Interface design for creative, thinking work is particularly important for software, which is a medium that has few true constraints. The medium of canvas or photography constrains output to two dimensions of shape and color. Recorded audio is a stream of sounds, writing is a stream of words. But software itself? It can take any perceptual form we ... See more