Human-Centered AI

The model was helpful—but only to an extent. They found that while AI improved the output of less creative writers, it made little difference to the quality of the stories produced by writers who were already creative.

Ideally, the future of humanity is about capturing the upside of emotion while minimizing the downsides. AI is a perfect instrument to help us achieve this balance.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has a beautiful explanation as to why Van Gogh’s masterpiece has resonated for over a century.

“You know what I like about The Starry Night?

It’s not what Van Gogh saw that night, it’s what he felt.

[The painting] is not a representation of reality and anything that deviates from is reality that has filtered through ... See more

If we want to understand what AIs are going to look like, I think the proto AI that we have are corporations. Corporations are sort of these funny little beasts. They’re not small. I guess they’re not little beasts, but they’re strange. It takes special training to have humans be able to fit within them. They’re made out of humans mostly but they’r... See more

Even with obvious deficiencies, large prompt-commanded multimodal models are proving to be flexible cognitive tools representing an unprecedented generality. But the directness, diversity, and degree of user interaction create a distinctive “human-centred generality” (HCG), rather than a fully autonomous one. HCG implies that —for a specific user— ... See more

In the most practical sense, we are now much less limited by ideas than ever before. Even people who don’t consider themselves creative now have access to a machine that will generate innovative concepts that beat those of most humans (though not the most creative ones). Where previously, there were only a few people who had the ability to come up ... See more

focus less on AI as something separate from humans, and more on tools that enhance human cognition rather than replacing it… If we want a future that is both superintelligent and "human", one where human beings are not just pets, but actually retain meaningful agency over the world, then it feels like something like this is the most natural option.

If you look at every technological shift or platform shift so far, it’s resulted in more things to design. You got the printing press, and then you have to figure out what you put on a page. More recently, mobile. You would think, “Okay. Less pixels, less designers.” But no, that’s when we saw the biggest explosion of designers.

—Dylan Field, Figma

A much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions.