Approach
I help arts, culture and heritage organisations build their own confident, critical and creative relationships with AI. I'm pro-learning, but I'm neutral when it comes to the actual AI and the technology's value. This approach is very specific, and here's what that means in more detail.
Why neutrality?
Generative AI represents a wide range of fast-growing tools and applications, and whether any of them is useful (or ethical) to you depends entirely on your own context, history, values and the work you do. Good results for one person can be poor, misaligned and unusable for another. It's not my place to decide which of these tools is worth your while, and it surprises me how many people working with this technology seem happy to. I won't make an assumption about your work and then tell you what AI will do for you.
Learning about AI isn't only about the tools you might choose to use, either. It's about how you function in a world where your audiences, your partners and the public are already being affected by them, from synthetic content and bots to scams and questions of personal safety. There should be room to learn about all of this without being sold anything, and to come away well equipped to position yourself however you choose, even if that means defending your rights and being received as “anti-AI”.
Playfulness
Playfulness demystifies AI and makes it feel less daunting, and it lets you experiment well away from your actual work. If the only conversation you're having is how a tool could slot into your workflow, you're always being pushed to adopt it before you've properly explored it, and that's where a lot of issues come from. So I keep a strict barrier between constructively playing and applying. Experiment freely, push tools to see where they hold up and where they don't, and only then decide what, if anything, belongs in your work.
A language of its own
Arts and culture is one of the sectors most immediately affected by generative AI, and a great deal has been done to it from the top down. So much of the language around AI comes from tech, business and government, and it's often the language of metrics and efficiency. There's nothing wrong with efficiency, but it isn't why art and culture get made, and it isn't why people choose to work in this field.
When you borrow language from other sectors you take on their values too, often without noticing. I think this sector is more than capable of doing its own thinking, finding its own language and its own independence, setting its own red lines and ethics, rather than taking its lead from a case study built for somewhere else.
Disagreement
I love it when there's a real range of opinions in a room, and I invite it. Being able to constructively disagree, and to represent your own interests while still collaborating with someone you don't agree with, is one of the most valuable skills there is around AI. How we manage that in the small space of a session often mirrors how those same conversations go across the rest of an organisation, so doing it well in miniature is genuinely useful.