Artistry, Sensemaking and Dialogue Projects by John Oliver
Art in the Age of AI
Reflections, Manifesto and Research Projects
This page summarises my explorations on the fundamentals of art's place and role in society, as guided by the 'transcendentals' of the Good (collective morals, faith), True (sciences, technologies) and Beautiful (aesthetics, arts).
Technology is therefore a necessary dimension for me to integrate in my art projects and dialogues.
I'm also holding the Transcendentals as lenses onto each other, such as we can (only?) understand one in its relationships - for example, art "as a technology', and technology 'as a religion'.
Below are the key headings that focus on my meaning-making quest with regards AI, as presented at the Bridging Dialogues conference in June 2024, Venice, Italy.
Reflections
and Research on Art and Artificial Intelligence
Yes, yet another pundit stepping into the AI topic. It seems everyone has to say their piece on the inevitable seduction of our human adventure to feed this technology behemoth. AI is certainly a classic manifestation of an exponential force, as its fortunes rise and fall, as new limitations are discovered.
I have been pursuing both training, research and application of AI in my arts and narratives practices, that equally fold back into my organisational development consulting work, based on the complexity sciences and developmental psychology.
The Arts and AI seem to evoke a fundamental polarity that I have felt to be profoundly meaningful for the human condition. It's almost that AI is forcing us to realise (or make more explicit) to a greater depth what makes us uniquely human. The Arts and AI can be then traced onto the cornerstones of philosophical thought, in terms of the Transcendentals, the Good, the True and the Beautiful (Religion, Science and the Arts).
A clear manifesto has emerged therefore for me, "making sense" of AI and the principles of technological evolution, as outlined below.
"In this day and age, how can anyone fascinated by creativity and beauty fail to see in computers the ultimate tool for exploring their essence?"
Douglas Hofstadter in his book "Metamagical Themas, Questing For The Essence of Mind and Pattern
AI and the Arts Manifesto
Making Sense of Exponential Technologies Through the Arts
01 - We Need To Understand AI Through A Segmentation of Complexity Domains
The complexity segmentation frameworks (e.g. Cynefin) can provide important insights to understanding AI and the polarities in play:
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The social discourse on AI currently lacks a coherent sense-making framework.
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Thanks to complexity segmentations such as in Cynefin, we can better understand the competing schools of thought in the AI community (LLM AI vs Symbolic AI)
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LLMs can be seen to be vast resources of "Complex" domain abstractions, whilst Symbolic AI falls into the Complicated" and "Obvious" domains (Symbolic AI was at the origin of first AI applications in the 70s and 80s, is having a resurgence in the AI community).
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We can then appreciate that our "sense-making" has to hold the dialectic of both LLM and Symbolic AI
02 - We Need A Renewed Theory of Art
AI (all all technological evolution) is forcing us to reflect equally on the evolution of the arts...and redefine what 'Art' actually is:
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We can see from the evolution of art (from symbolic, classic, romantic, modern, to post-modern "construct aware") it is pointing us to see beyond Art as 'object', and towards the experience itself; no longer as a noun, but a verb.
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I have referred to this distinction as a move from "Art" to "Artistry" (see links below for my presentation on this).
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Distilling therefore a theory of Art, from an anthropological lens, it offers the human condition a uniquely contextual holding of dialectical forces (incl paradoxes and contradictions).
03 - AI and Art Can Offer Us Generative Dialectical Dialogue
Not only are there crucial polarities within the AI domain between abstraction and codification, but there are also 'holographic' dialectics between the Good, True and Beautiful
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Art is itself therefore a technology of open-ended, emergent meaning making - an essential pillar.
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How can we make the engagement of our differences as an aesthetic dialogue, as generative conflict?
Ultimately, we are called all to "Artistry", as agents in complexity!
Please see here my Zoom conference presentation to the Prometheus Project (March 2024) on exploring and defining Artistry, and the presentation slides here.
"AI Sensemaking" Video Narratives Portal
As a prototype platform for how AI can be applied to the domain of "Narratives Sensemaking", an interactive portal of mapping and signification of portrait videos by John Oliver https://www.youtube.com/@interiortruth can accessed here: https://ideoscopic.ai
The design of the portal integrates signification frameworks on ego developmental constructs (Kegan) and levels of self-reflexive focusing (Klein/Gendlin). The goal of this prototype is to explore how to integrate the principle "dialectics" of LLMs vs Symbolic AI. LLMs are used in the portal to interpret the narratives, with a tentative step to integrating rule-based (symbolic) intelligence from a range of analytical frameworks.
Participate in our research project of AI, organisations and the barrier of meaning
Integrating the fields of complexity sciences and developmental psychology, this project is a collaboration between experienced organisational development practitioners, to gather first hand accounts as to how AI is actually being deployed in complex environments, and to ascertain clear principles and practices in ethical AI deployment.
Research References
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Conference Presentations:
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John Oliver LinkedIn Posts:
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Mapping AI across the spectrum of cognition - LLM and Symbolic AI as representations of the polarity between abstraction and codification - April 2024
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Understanding the “Barrier of Meaning” in AI from the perspective of the complexity sciences - February 2024
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My Notion Page on notes from the 2023 course by JF Martel on "Art in the Age of AI"
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Video Resources:
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Workshop on AI and the Barrier of Meaning 2, April 24-26, 2023 Santa Fe Institute
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Research Papers:
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LLMs Can't Plan, But Can Help Planning in LLM-Modulo Frameworks Proceedings of the 41 st International Conference on Machine Learning, Vienna, Austria. PMLR 235, 2024
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Comparing LLM and Symbolic AI designs to Daniel Kahneman’s “System 1” (intuitive abstraction cognition) and “System 2” (analytical codified cognition)
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What are human values, and how do we align AI to them? Oliver Klingefjord, Ryan Lowe, Joe Edelman. Meaning Alignment Institute 17 Apr 2024
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Large Language Models Need Symbolic AI - Northwestern and Indiana Universities NeSy 2023, 17th International Workshop on Neural-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning, Certosa di Pontignano, Siena, Italy
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