Sarah Schwettmann

http://www.cogconfluence.com

AI Models as a Shared Creative Resource

The Human Use of New Machines

This talk is born out of a series of collaborations with deep generative models that capture human creativity at different scales. These tools hold a beautiful promise: within reach is the ability for anyone to collaborate with executable models of individual and collective cultural history, on a timeline allowing experimentation and rapid evolution in the present. To fully realize this future, we need modes of multiplexing creation, across platforms and processes, that are understood as a magnification of creative identity rather than a dilution. How can we establish infrastructure and norms around contributing to shared models, and around the idea of models as a shared resource? At their best, such models both facilitate co-creation and provide a context for interpreting the structure underlying human creativity and perception — a feedback loop befitting a 21st century articulation of iterative creativity.

Bio

Sarah Schwettmann is a neuroscientist and machine learning researcher at MIT CSAIL. She completed her PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, where she was an NSF Fellow. Her work investigates generalizable representations for vision in biological and artificial neural networks. She is broadly interested in creativity underlying the human relationship to the world: from the brain's fundamentally constructive role in sensory perception to the explicit creation of experiential worlds in art. Sarah designed and teaches MIT's first course on Vision in Art and Neuroscience, and leads research efforts in the MIT Museum Studio.

Sarah has translated her work into a wide range of collaborations, including with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MIT Open Learning, Microsoft Research, the Knowledge Futures Group, MIT Quest for Intelligence, MFA Boston, Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and the MIT Museum. Prior to MIT she lived in Houston, Texas, where her work was in theoretical neuroscience.