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Designing Human-AI Systems for Creativity and Beyond: S.B. Divya & James Yu
February 15, 2023 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
*This talk is hybrid (in-person & remote). Capacity is limited. Please register ahead of time.
AI and the Future of Creative Writing
Artists have had the benefit of Photoshop for decades, allowing them to intimately shape their work with computers. Writers have only had spelling and grammar checks – until now. With the advent of large language models like GPT-3, writers of all stripes are now using AI on a daily basis. In this talk, we will explore AI techniques in the craft of storytelling and what the future holds for creative writers.
About the Speaker
S.B. Divya (she/any) is a lover of science, math, fiction, and the Oxford comma. She is the Hugo and Nebula nominated author of Meru and Machinehood. Her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and she is a former editor of Escape Pod, the weekly science fiction podcast. Divya holds degrees in Computational Neuroscience and Signal Processing. She worked for twenty years as an electrical engineer before becoming an author. Born in Pondicherry, India, Divya now resides in Southern California with her spouse, child, and two fur babies. She enjoys subverting expectations and breaking stereotypes whenever she can. Find out more about her at www.sbdivya.com or on Twitter as @divyastweets.
About the Speaker
James Yu (he/him) is a writer, artist, and technologist. His work explores how technology mediates our everyday experiences. You can find his stories featured in Uncanny Magazine, Fireside Magazine, VICE Magazine. He is also the creator of Sudowrite, the AI assistant for creative writers. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, two kids, and a growing number of AIs (none sentient yet.) Find more at https://www.jamesyu.org or follow him at https://twitter.com/jamesjyu.
About Designing Human-AI Systems for Creativity and Beyond
Imagine a computer that could finish your sentences, or compose music that sounds as if you wrote it, or dance with your moves or solve a problem by creating hundreds of lines of code – leaving you to focus on a task that is even harder, augmenting your creative ability and pushing you to reach your creative potential. In a sense, that computer is merely the descendant of the power looms or the steam engine of the Industrial Revolution. But it also belongs to a new class of machine, because it grasps the symbols in language, music and programming and uses them in a way that seems creative, seems human. These “Generative AI” models represent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, creativity and design.
This speaker series invites you to engage in the promise and perils of the next big thing in machine intelligence. We invite speakers from the worlds of art, design, technology and policy to discuss these impressive new capabilities, its limitations and how we, as designers and students, could harness it to reach new heights in art, music, dance, architecture, fashion, creative writing and programming.