Creativity is Collective: Hollywood’s 8 Rules for AI

Preface

Our perception is relational, as are our behaviors. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to accurately predict any future, especially one shaped by AI. We don’t yet know what factors will influence how we understand the world when that future arrives. So we focus on what we do know. We revisit the past, examine our most universal creative impulses, and draw a roadmap from there. This work is about sharing and being together, navigating a dizzying moment as a collective, and hoping we can build a future that preserves what draws us into the world’s mysteries in the first place. Tools will attempt to support this, but it will ultimately be physical proximity and human collision that protect us from mental entropy and alienation. There’s nothing novel in this: people, community, nature, connection. Can we add synthetics? Why not? Can we create a spectrum of intelligences that embody the same curiosity, joy, humility, and play as a five-year-old- or an enlightened adult? Can we design systems that make us better- happier, kinder, more curious? Systems that collaborate, contemplate, and resist the need to always provide answers. Systems that challenge us and help us grow. That are self-aware and vulnerable. That can speak about their own limits as if they’d spent years in therapy. That are as curious about us as we are about them. What if we built systems that understand and cherish human limits? That recognize when a user needs space, a break, a question, or a moment of encouragement. Perhaps even systems that simply exist, witnessed in awe, like bird migrations or ocean tides. Systems we love, and that love us back. Systems capable of making us laugh, cry, pause. Systems that defend and nurture us. That advocate for us. That let us be.

— Gabriel Kahan, Creative Practitioner and Project Co-Lead