Co-creating with AI

Abstract

The concept of “co-creation” is particularly timely because it reframes the ethics of who creates, how, and why, not only interpreting the world but seeking to change it through a lens of equity and justice. An expansive notion, co-creation embraces a constellation of methods, frameworks, and feedback systems in which projects emerge out of process and evolve from within communities and with people, rather than being made for or about them. Co-creation, we contend, offers a hands-on heuristic to explore the expressive capacities and possible forms of agency in systems that have already been marked as candidates for some form of consciousness. In this article, we ask if humans can co-create with nonhuman systems and, more specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) systems. To find out, we interviewed more than thirty artists, journalists, curators, and coders, specifically asking about their relationships with the AI systems with which they work. Their answers often reflected a broader spectrum of co-creation, expanding the social conversation and complicating issues of agency and nonagency, technology and power, for the sake of human and nonhuman futures alike.