This AI laboratory represents the practical application of archetype system and ‘Six Cs’ framework—specifically Craft and Creativity, as we begin to look at technology in relation to Consciousness.
Here, I explore how natural language can be used to direct AI to produce high-end, brand-aligned aesthetics without losing the human soul.
AI: Modern Technology & Ancient Philosophy
Brands and leaders will need to cultivate Craft (AI), Creativity (out-of-the-box thinking), Consciousness (meaning), and make novel Connections to survive and thrive in an AI-dominated world.
A powerful and revolutionary (or, perhaps, evolutionary) tool for modern corporations and creatives, AI is making us question the nature of consciousness and the nature of being. These are timeless questions that had been largely forgotten. “Form is emptiness,” says the Zen Buddhist-influenced Samurai manual, the Hagakure; “emptiness is form.” Such insights can help us make sense of the hypermodern.
Ironically, perhaps, AI is making human excellence ever more essential, at least at the highest levels of business and design. My AI work is concerned with more than HITL (“human in the loop”). It is a Zen meditation on being itself. And it is simultaneously concerned (1) with rediscovering human depth and genius and (2) infusing AI work with deep meaning.
“Our bodies are given life from the midst of nothingness. Existing where there is nothing is the meaning of the phrase, ‘form is emptiness.’ That all things are provided for by nothingness is the meaning of the phrase, ‘Emptiness is form.’ One should not think that these are two separate things.”—Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure (18th century).
AI Metaphysics
Generative AI can produce whatever we can articulate.
But few people can articulate precisely. In my work, I have read hundreds of articles by persons of above-average (perhaps, considerably above-average) intelligence. Many of the writers were in their thirties and forties. Yet, sentence structures were confused, and the meaning (if they had one) was often unclear.
I’ve heard design directors ask a designer to adjust a color so that it is “brighter and darker—you know what I mean.” I know what they meant. (They meant “deeper.”) But vague and contradictory requests will not yield powerful results even with the latest AI model.
In his Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1978), Julian Jaynes claimed that consciousness emerged with language, and that thinking with language is essentially what it means to be conscious. I don’t think that is correct.
But the claim may be more relevant today, not only because of the emergence of LLMs, but because we must be conscious of our word choice when working with LLMs. “Bad input equals bad output” is a saying in computer science that might now be relevant to all of us.
Images can be produced from “prompts.” But the AI divide will be between those who deeply, question, and who are highly skilled in language (and/or imagery), and those who are not. That divide will be widened by those who understand meaning (or what we used to call “the soul”) and those who do not.
“To be or not to be.” Everyone knows this line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But what does it mean “to be” in a world not only of “Artificial Intelligence” but of AI models, digital fashion, and even digital clones.
A male model wearing a “I do not exist” sweater. Model and sweater designed in Adobe and brought to life with AI. (Part of my deep AI project Essence ov Being/EovB.)
AI is for Dreamers
The current frustration (of many uses) with AI seems to derive from the desire to have it generate outputs in the same way that calculators calculate mathematical problems. That is, most users of AI want to get logical, predictable, unvarying results.
But AI uses probability (and, to some degree) randomness.
If it doesn’t produce predictable results (in, and of, itself), it also does not produce as a human creates. When it generates an image, for example, it does not create an outline (beginning at a certain point and tracing the human form or object of a still life painting). The AI image emerges from a fuzzy image to one that is clearly defined. It is much closer to our dreaming than our conscious image-making.
Probability, makes AI somewhat similar to ancient “divination.”
In business today, there is the concept of “signal” versus “noise.” Accordingly, we have to focus on the “signal” and block out the “noise.” Yet, when we look at highly successful people, there is often a lot of “noise” in their lives. It’s simply that they integrate this noise.
Businessman Kevin O’Leary, who speaks of signal and noise, is, notably, also a keen photographer. And, if business is signal, we’d think that photography is noise. But it’s something that O’Leary loves. And, I suspect, it’s also integral to his way of viewing the world (which, no doubt, affects the way he views business).
In other words, we need noise. It’s just that we also need to differentiate low-quality noise from high-quality noise, and turn the former into a signal.
AI introduces “noise.”
AI randomness and probability mean that we will have to get used to working in noise. Or working with ambiguity. (This is something that creative geniuses are comfortable with.)
Highly successful users of AI tools will be those who think outside the box to turn noise into signal.
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