Creative Machines and Human Creativity: Building AI that Makes Us More Creative Instead of Replacing Us

About this episode

Maya Ackerman discusses the intersection of AI and human creativity, emphasizing the importance of maintaining our creative spirit in the face of technological advancements.

Seeing that tall black and brown piano in the background before our interview, I sense tradition of human creativity meeting AI. This is about us. When Maya Ackerman’s family immigrated to Canada , her piano stayed behind in Israel. That instrument had been more than wood and keys . It’s where emotions melt into music into a feeling, processing change with simple sounds arising from deep wells of experience. The piano was, and is, her creative partner - even when it wasn’t there. Don’t Give Up Your Piano: A Conversation About Creative Machines That Serve, Not Replace Now, as a professor at Santa Clara University and CEO of WaveAI , Ackerman sees us at risk of losing something far bigger: our collective creative piano. Not to AI itself, but to fear of what AI might become. Her new book Creative Machines: AI, Art & Us launches with a message that cuts through the replacement anxiety: “AI has always been, and will always be, all about us.” Ackerman spent years in foundational machine learning before a talk by artist Harold Cohen changed everything. She switched to computational creativity, that unpopular intersection where machines meet human expression. She’s built AI tools for…

People in this episode

Host: Declan Dunn

Guest: Maya Ackerman

Topics covered

• AI and creativity
• computational creativity
• human expression
• machine learning
• artistic collaboration

Keywords

• AI
• creativity
• computational creativity
• machine learning
• art
• musicians
• human expression

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Santa Clara University, WaveAI

Books & works: Creative Machines: AI, Art & Us

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