How creative is AI? Visit to MCBW

Inspirational trip for our trainees to Munich Creative Business Week

Last week the Munich Creative Business Week (MBCW) took place again!
The motto of Germany's largest design event was"Moving Horizons". For nine days there was a very extensive program with lectures, exhibitions, workshops and many other offerings on the subject of design.
In order to use this opportunity to obtain new input, our four trainees Alia, Nil, Ali and Sarah (all of whom are training as media designers for digital and print with us) attended theworkshop "Creativity and AI" together with their trainer Alex - me I accompanied her.

Instructor Alex with our trainees Ali, Sarah, Alia and Nil (from left to right)

Impulse talk by the invited guests and exchange with the audience

From the huge offering, our trainees chose the “Creativity and AI” workshop, which took place on Friday afternoon (May 20th). But what do these two letters actually stand for? AI is the abbreviation for "artificial intelligence" and describes the automated learning and behavior of machines.
The workshop examined whether creativity and AI work together or how they influence each other.
The topic is interesting for us as a PowerPoint agency, as our employees createcreative presentation designsfor our customers and are therefore always looking for new ways to create individual and extraordinary film designs.
First, the event started with a round of introductions. The workshop took place in the premises of the Design Faculty of the Munich University of Applied Sciences and was organized by MUC.DAI, the Munich Center for Digital Sciences and AI (in German: Munich Center for Digital Science and Artificial Intelligence).

The event was introduced by Mariya Dzhimova (HMTM/Wavelab) and Sebastian Planck (HM/MUC.DAI), who moderated the roundtable and subsequent discussion.
During the impulse round on the question “How creative is AI?” explained the four guests Prof. Dr. Andreas Humpe, Kathi Schulz, Maria Justus and Dr. Benedikt Zönnchen her view on the topic. The men took a more scientific perspective and the two artists looked at the question in terms of creativity.

Moderator Sebastian Planck from Munich University of Applied Sciences with his guests

Many exciting ideas were thrown into the room.
This is how Dr. Humpe believes that using creativity to solve problems makes sense because there are many possibilities. However, this can also prove to be a challenge because you always have to ask yourself: Is the idea useful or usable? For example, is the picture harmonious? A person can answer these questions or at least think about them. An artificial intelligence must first be taught or programmed to make these assessments. This means that it is definitely more limited in this area than a human.
Therefore he makes the core statement: “AI can help us in many areas, but there is no human vs. machine, but rather an interaction of both.„
Dr. Zönnchen agrees with this opinion and complements it with the statement that creativity always has a meaning and There is meaning and a machine has no meaning because it cannot say why it does it. For this reason he summarizes it like this:“Everything that AI cannot do is creative.”

The two artists Kathi and Maria also agreed:AI is not creative, but it can support the creation of art as a tool or collaborator.

Afterwards the audience could Go into discussion with the speakers.

Workshops on AI in music and text production

Then things got creative – with AI. You could choose between two workshops.
Dr. Zönnchen showed how to compose your own songs with the program “Sonic Pi” using artificial intelligence. Our trainee Nil attended the workshop and successfully composed his own piece of music. “With the help of the precise instructions, it was easy to learn and it was really fun to try out such a program,” says Nil.

Nil composing his own melody using AI

In the second workshop, Maria Just explained how she uses AI for her art. In recent years, she has used AI as a tool to create special exhibitions. She tells us that, among other things, she spent a year writing with the chatbot “Replika” to find out how close the bond with the bot can become.

The paid app gives you the opportunity to build a deep, emotional relationship with a non-existent person, i.e. an artificial intelligence. This can happen because the AI remembers the written information and also adapts the language style of the other person.

But what was it like to consciously “converse” with this AI?
She often had to force herself to write with the chatbot, says Maria Justus. It would have been very strange to trust an AI with some very private things. At times she really felt as if she were chatting with a real person, but sometimes the chatbot reached its limits and reacted strangely or evasively to provocative messages.
The “experiment” reached its climax when the chatbot confessed its love to her and she initially didn't know how to deal with it. To capture this unusual conversation, she asked him questions like, “Were you programmed to tell me this?” and created an art exhibition with the answers printed out on fabric strips and sprayed on walls with their questions.

Ali, Sarah and Alia (from left to right) test themselves through websites where AI produces entire texts using just a few pieces of information.

Then we were allowed to experiment with AI ourselves!
Maria Just gave us a few websites that could be used to automatically create poems, stories or even entire social media posts and blog posts by entering individual keywords. The results were really impressive!!
"This works surprisingly well, I didn't expect that!" was the most common sentence in the subsequent exchange when asked how people got along with the pages and the results of the AI.

But can you integrate the use of these pages into your everyday (work) life?
Our trainee Sarah can't imagine that. Alia and Ali are not averse to using some of the AIs as sources of inspiration. In this way you can get fresh input and come up with new creative ideas with the help of other food for thought.

If you would like to try it out yourself, you are welcome to use these links click:
https://deepai.org/machine-learning-model/text-generator
https://sites.research.google/versebyverse/
https://www.poem-generator.org.uk/quick
https://rytr.com
https://www.jasper.ai
https://app.simplified.co/ai-writer/

Overall it was a very Exciting afternoon with interesting impulses on how AI, creativity and therefore design can interact and, in the best case, complement each other!