How AI can help supercharge creativity

One weeknight this past February, Wilson plugged her laptop into a projector that threw her screen onto the wall of a low-ceilinged loft space in East London. A small crowd shuffled in the glow of dim pink lights. Wilson sat down and started programming.

Techno clicks and whirs thumped from the venue’s speakers. The audience watched, heads nodding, as Wilson tapped out code line by line on the projected screen—tweaking sounds, looping beats, pulling a face when she messed up.  

Wilson is a live coder. Instead of using purpose-built software like most electronic music producers, live coders create music by writing the code to generate it on the fly. It’s an improvised performance art known as algorave. 

“It’s kind of boring when you go to watch a show and someone’s just sitting there on their laptop,” she says. “You can enjoy the music, but there’s a performative aspect that’s missing. With live coding, everyone can see what it is that I’m typing. And when I’ve had my laptop crash, people really like that. They start cheering.”

Taking risks is part of the vibe. And so Wilson likes to dial up her performances one more notch by riffing off what she calls a live-coding agent, a generative AI model that comes up with its own beats and loops to add to the mix. Often the model suggests sound combinations that Wilson hadn’t thought of. “You get these elements of surprise,” she says. “You just have to go for it.”  

Wilson, a researcher at the Creative Computing Institute at the University of the Arts London, is just one of many working on what’s known as co-¬creativity or more-than-human creativity. The idea is that AI can be used to inspire or critique creative projects, helping people make things that they would not have made by themselves. She and her colleagues built the live-¬coding agent to explore how artificial intelligence can be used to support human artistic endeavors—in Wilson’s case, musical improvisation.

It’s a vision that goes beyond the promise of existing generative tools put out by companies like OpenAI and Google DeepMind. Those can automate a striking range of creative tasks and offer near-instant gratification—but at what cost? Some artists and researchers fear that such technology could turn us into passive consumers of yet more AI slop.

And so they are looking for ways to inject human creativity back into the process. The aim is to develop AI tools that augment our creativity rather than strip it from us—pushing us to be better at composing music, developing games, designing toys, and much more—and lay the groundwork for a future in which humans and machines create things together.

Ultimately, generative models could offer artists and designers a whole new medium, pushing them to make things that couldn’t have been made before, and give everyone creative superpowers.

show less