The Dark Room
AI can't explain its creativity. Neither can we.
The house I grew up in is the same house my mom grew up in with her seven siblings. When my grandparents lived there in the 60s and 70s, my uncle converted one of the rooms in the basement into a dark room. He went on to become a professional photographer. My very first job was working at his studio in Philadelphia.
I’ve been thinking a lot about AI and cinema since that panel on the Future of AI in Cinema1 I wrote about last week.
Both the AI and human artists are working in some version of a dark room.
One of the most surprising moments of the night centered on this debate: Is AI a legitimate creative partner?
The filmmakers were divided.
We’d just watched four short films made with AI — an act of blasphemy to many working artists in this moment.2 Part of the reason I wanted to attend the panel was to hear from the artists daring to touch it.
A film student asked the panel during the Q&A: how do you use AI in the creative process? Are you exchanging ideas with a machine or algorithm in the same way you can exchange ideas with a human?
Two of the filmmakers admitted to using AI to generate ideas to stimulate their own creative processes. One filmmaker rejected it as a brainstorming tool all together.
“You eat yourself when you brainstorm with AI”, he exclaimed. He then shared an anecdote about how differently AI evaluated his screenplay before and after he instructed it to role play an “expert”. At first it was great. Then it was terrible. He concluded it can’t be a creative partner and shouldn’t be used for brainstorming because it can’t have it’s own opinion. It’s opinion is always going to be shaped by the prompt you give it and so it’s not objective.
He doubled down: Where does it’s taste occur? It’s unknown how it works. They don’t know how it’s formed.
In the same breath, he argued for the supremacy of human creativity and revealed he doesn’t understand what makes it work.
The conversation shifted.
What is creativity after all?
That’s when it really struck me.
The present debate is often framed as AI versus Human Creativity.
But the real conflict is actually much older: we don’t understand creativity.
Anyone who has felt the pull to create something — that feeling of being “possessed by an idea” — will struggle to tell you where it came from.
I’ve experienced it first hand, with songwriting and dance. It’s almost like you become a channel for something beyond you. The very first song I ever wrote — Dear Jeanne — came out of me the afternoon my grandmother passed away, fully formed. It’s still one of the best songs I’ve ever written. It took me five years to write another song because I had no idea where it came from in the first place. It kind of freaked me out.
When I started reading The Artist’s Way last June, it’s core idea — that Creative Source is a mystery bigger than ourselves — resonated deeply with my songwriting experience. The Artist’s Way has a whole vocabulary for opening yourself up to “receive” and “transmit” ideas through a daily creative practice. As “woo woo” has it sounds, it’s how many creatives describe the experience.
Creativity has long been revered for its mystical origins. An acceptable mystery of little consequence — until the arrival of AI.
What if the mystery AI creativity and the mystery of human creativity are the same mystery?
I keep coming back to the metaphor of a dark room.
A photographer’s darkroom is similar to a black box. A black box is a system whose inputs and outputs are observable, but whose internal mechanism is unknown. In the context of creativity and cinema, theres an even richer metaphor: a photography darkroom. You put something in (the negative), and something comes out (the print). The transformation happens in the darkness.
The question of AI creativity is forcing us to look at human creativity more carefully.
The interesting question isn’t “is AI creative?”. It’s “what will we discover about creativity by trying to answer that question.”
Til Next Week,
Carly
Last week I wrote about a panel I attended on the Future of AI in Cinema. Four filmmakers. Four short films made with AI. Four different perspectives on the future of AI as a tool for creativity. The discussion was so rich, I filled nearly twenty pages of my little 2x3 notepad.
For many in the entertainment industry, AI is an extremely triggering subject. It’s unpopular politics to many, a touchy subject to most.