Creativity Squared: On A.I., Awareness, & Agency

Dear Creativity Squared Member,

Today’s guest traveled from the future to deliver a message just for you!

Discover what it is in Episode 21 now.

Karen Palmer is the Storyteller from the Future. She’s an award-winning international artist and TED Speaker who is at the forefront of immersive storytelling, futurism, and tech.

She creates immersive film experiences that watch you back using artificial intelligence and facial recognition.

Karen has been the opening keynote speaker at AT&T Shape Conference, MIT, Wired for Wonder Festival Australia, and TEDx Australia at the Sydney Opera House. She’s exhibited around the world, including NYC Armoury Arts Week, Museum of Modern Art Peru, PHI Centre Montreal, and more. Her art has also been featured in publications like Wired, Fast Company, and The Guardian, where they hailed her work as "leapfrogging over VR."

Her latest project is Consensus Gentium which had its world debut at SXSW this past March where Karen also won the SXSW 2023 Film & TV Jury Award in the XR Experience Category.

Consensus Gentium is a powerful exploration of the implications of A.I. technology. Experienced on a mobile device, Consensus Gentium taps into the intimacy and authenticity of your smartphone features to create a realistic experience. Set in a near future, it is an emotionally responsive film that integrates cutting-edge facial detection and A.I. to transport audiences on a unique quest to discover what could happen if we succumb to unchecked surveillance.

Karen and I first met at SXSW this past March and then saw each other again at Ars Electronica this month, and I couldn’t be more excited to have her come from the future to speak to the Creativity Squared community.

In Episode 21, you’ll learn more about Karen and her latest project Consensus Gentium in addition to her social justice approach to her work that explores A.I. bias and unchecked surveillance. You’ll understand why she sees it necessary to democratize A.I., how you can experience the future today through her “reality simulators,” and how she uses immersive art to make you conscious of your subconscious behavior.

Don’t miss this glimpse into the future — check out Episode 21 today!

Scroll on to discover:

• 🎧 More on Episode 21

• 🤯 A.I. + Creativity News Roundup

• 🪞 Watch: ‘Joan Is Awful’ — The Unsettling Intersection of Hollywood, A.I., and Black Mirror

• 👯‍♀️ Digitally Clone Yourself!

• 💎 Creativity Squared Premium Member Benefits

• 💝 Milestone Rewards

We’re just getting started, and if you enjoy our content, I’d really appreciate it if you could share, review, like, subscribe, leave a comment, and help spread the word about Creativity Squared in whatever way you’re willing to. Your support is greatly appreciated, and the whole team looks forward to growing with your help. Thank you!

Here's to exponential possibilities!

Helen

Also Noteworthy:

🙋‍♀️ Want your own custom synthetic avatar? Creativity Squared is collaborating with our partner and sponsor Render to bring their avatar experience to Cincinnati, OH, on October 25 and 26, so anyone can digitally clone themselves. If you’re interested in this, sign up here.

🐝 We use Beehiiv for this newsletter and Riverside for recording podcast episodes, and recommend them!

🎨 I want to live in a world where artists not only coexist with A.I., but thrive. And because it’s important to support artists, 10% of all revenue Creativity Squared generates goes to ArtsWave, a nationally recognized non-profit that supports over 150 arts organizations, projects, and independent artists. Consider becoming a Premium Member today! 

🚀 Interested in becoming a sponsor of Creativity Squared? Reach out!

Helen Todd (she/her)
Human behind Creativity Squared
linkedin / twitter / pinterest / instagram

CreativitySquared.com
youtube / instagram / facebook / tiktok 
How creatives are collaborating with A.I.

Listen: E21. A Message About A.I. from the Future:
Unlock Awareness and Agency through Immersive Storytelling with SXSW 2023 XR Winner Karen Palmer

Apple | Spotify | YouTube | Pandora | Amazon | Google | SoundCloud | iHeart Radio

While there’s plenty of dystopian nightmare fuel in our present timeline, Karen’s latest project, Consensus Gentium, transports participants to the near future, where A.I. surveillance is the norm and citizens are constantly monitored for compliance.

Consensus Gentium is Latin for “if everyone believes it, it must be true.” The narrative of the interactive experience challenges viewers to navigate a world in which multiple pandemics and advanced global warming became the catalysts for the government to curtail citizens’ mobility. While on a quest to help their sick grandma, an A.I.-enabled camera analyzes over 50 cues on the participant’s face to determine their emotional state, which determines the participant’s level of compliance and how much mobility they’re able to achieve.

Through her efforts to help audiences see the future today, Karen considers herself part of an “invisible movement” of artists and thought leaders trying to demystify the transformative technologies of our time through art. Instead of watching their civil liberties gradually erode away by the relentless march of technology and consolidation of power, Karen wants to empower people to understand the narratives unfolding in real time, understand their role in the narrative, and, ultimately, their role in the future.

Check out the interview with Karen and the accompanying blog post for Episode 21 today.

Your A.I. + Creativity News Roundup

With all of the A.I. news flooding our feeds and screens, we’ve got you covered. News to check out includes:

• AI just beat a human test for creativity. What does that even mean? MIT Technology Review — A recent study found that some popular chatbots managed to come up with more creative uses for household items than humans could, on average. Yet the most creative response from a human scored higher than the most creative response from a chatbot. Experts are split on whether the results indicate actual creativity developing inside large language models or if the chatbots merely have training data from the same kind of test that they could repurpose.

• Franzen, Grisham and Other Prominent Authors Sue OpenAI New York Times — A group of prominent authors have thrown their weight behind a growing movement of creatives seeking damages from A.I. companies. The group of best-selling authors says that output from ChatGPT includes granular details of their works, indicating that the model was trained on the texts themselves, not reviews or synopses. OpenAI has responded to similar lawsuits arguing that A.I. training should be considered Fair Use of the copyrighted works.

• Real or AI? The Tech Giants Racing to Stop the Spread of Fake Images The Future of Everything, WSJ Podcasts — Concern is growing that A.I.-generated images will soon be realistic enough to fool even the most discerning observers. Artifacts of the diffusion process are less common and less noticeable in generated images, a trend expected to continue. The podcast discusses potential solutions, including the idea of a certificate of authenticity for every image.

• OpenAI Red Teaming Network OpenAI — The company behind ChatGPT is looking for experts in persuasion, cybersecurity, healthcare, and other disciplines to help stress test A.I. models before they’re released. Team members may only need to put in 5-10 hours of work per year, and compensation is available. Applications open!

• Google Expands AI Chatbot Bard To Apps Like Gmail, Drive And YouTube Forbes — Google announced this week that its flagship A.I. chatbot, Bard, is now integrated with the company’s range of tools, including Gmail and Drive. That means Bard can now pull data of different types from various sources, process it, and generate a result all in the chat window. Multiple users can also contribute to the same conversation thread by sharing links.

• DALL·E 3 OpenAI — The latest advancement in text-to-image A.I. is better able to understand natural language and is built to reduce copyright infringement. OpenAI says that users won’t need complicated prompts to get their intended image on DALL-E 3. Copyright owners can opt out of their images from being used to train the model. And the new DALL-E is also built to decline requests for an image in the specific style of a living artist. The new model will be available on web browsers later this Fall.

• Google Nears Release of Gemini AI to Challenge OpenAI The Information (Subscribe with 25% off to support us) — A small group of companies reportedly now have access to a limited version of the A.I. model that’s being billed as Google’s answer to OpenAI’s GPT-4. The limited release indicates that Google may be getting closer to launching the model more widely.

Watch: ‘Joan Is Awful’
The Unsettling Intersection of Hollywood, A.I., and Black Mirror

Given its focus on near-future tech dystopia that uncannily mirrors the real world, it is perhaps no surprise that Black Mirror often seems remarkably prescient.

In fact, from a cartoonish figure running for high office in the second season episode ‘The Waldo Moment’ to the camera-equipped contact lenses depicted in season one’s ‘The Entire History of You’ (which resemble “smart contact” technology now in development by Google and Samsung), the popular anthology series has often seemed downright prophetic.

But rarely has this phenomenon been more apparent, nor has life imitated art faster than in the case of Black Mirror’s sixth season premiere, ‘Joan Is Awful.’ The episode, which explores the controversial use of A.I.-generated digital likenesses in the entertainment industry, debuted just one month before the Hollywood writers and actors union strikes began.

A primary point of contention in these real-life labor disputes? The film studios’ proposed use of A.I. technology, including the use of digital likenesses.

Concerns about the ethical and professional implications of A.I.-generated scripts and performances are not new. However, the current standoff in Hollywood has brought the issue dramatically to the forefront of the broader conversation about the impact of A.I. on art.

Let’s unpack the parallels between Black Mirror’s chilling look into a possible future and the real-world dystopian potential of A.I.-generated entertainment.

Sign Up: Digitally Clone Yourself
Now There Can be Two of You!

👯‍♀️ In case you missed the announcement, I’ve digitally cloned myself! There are less than a thousand known custom synthetic avatars in existence. Learn all about mine in episode E14. Not Deepfaked! I Cloned Myself. You’ll meet Helen 2.ODD, my digital double, and discover why and how I made my A.I.-created custom synthetic avatar.

🙋‍♀️ Want your own custom synthetic avatar? Creativity Squared is collaborating with our partner and sponsor Render to bring their avatar experience to Cincinnati, OH, on October 25 and 26, so anyone can digitally clone themselves. If you’re interested in this, sign up here.

Thank You to Render

Creativity Squared is supported by Render which provides Digital Likeness solutions for personal brand businesses, thought leaders, influencers, and business leaders who want to leverage their synthetic, A.I.-powered Likeness to communicate more effectively online and create audio and video content from anywhere without going on camera. Learn more by visiting: https://rendermedia.ai.

Interested in partnering with Creativity Squared? Reach out!

Become a Premium Member to Unlock Exclusive Content and Claim Your NFT

Become a Premium Member to unlock exclusive content and to claim your NFTs of episode cover art!

At $10 per month or discounted to $100 for annual memberships, Premium Members enjoy other benefits too:

• $1 per month (or $10 per year) to ArtsWave

• Premium Member NFT

• First-Dibs at Event Invites

• Access to Monthly Exclusive Content (e.g. Helen’s Monthly Must-Know Video Report on the hottest A.I. news)

• Discounts from Creativity Squared Partners

• Thank You by Name in the Creativity Squared Newsletter

There is also a VIP Founding Member tier for those who want lifetime first dibs and access to Creativity Squared content, events, and whatever we dream up!

Because it’s important to support artists, 10% of all revenue Creativity Squared generates will go to ArtsWave, a nationally recognized non-profit that supports over 100 arts organizations.

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.