Étiquette : digital world

Let’s Be Human with AI

Publié le Publié dans Understanding Today's Culture (EN)Étiqueté , , , , , , , , 3 commentaires

Bringing Humanity into This Algorithmic World

Human figure integrated into an abstract digital composition with geometric forms, evoking human presence in an algorithmic world.

Read this article in French:
Soyons humains avec l’IA

An Everyday Scene

You want to share a photo you took of a landscape from your home region.

You write a few lines to accompany the image, then ask an artificial intelligence for its opinion. It slightly rephrases your text. It then suggests improving the appearance of the photo.

You eventually publish the revised image and text.

Is this still an authentic trace of your human experience, even though AI played a part in creating it?

You were there. The AI was not. It helped you give form to this trace, but the experience it conveys is yours.

Let’s take another example. A person can tell their life story to a biographer who turns it into a book. They could also record their story, publish it as a podcast, or ask an AI to help organize and write their autobiography. In all these cases, the experience being told remains that of a person who actually lived it.

An authentic trace does not come from the tool that was used. It comes from the human experience we inscribe in it.

And what about the future?

Artificial intelligence will probably become an increasingly ordinary part of our toolkit. We will use it to write, translate, search, create images, organize our ideas, or communicate.

The question, then, will not only be whether AI played a part in what we publish, but also what we brought to it.

Our memories, knowledge, encounters, emotions, observations, and creations can become authentic traces of human experience. In the arts, an artist can use AI or any other digital tool while still inscribing their experience, perspective, and artistic approach into their work.

Once published, these traces enter the network. They can circulate, be discovered, shared, preserved, and become part of global culture.

We do more than simply use the digital world. Through what we choose to create, publish, and circulate within it, we also participate in shaping what it becomes.

Tools will continue to change. Let us continue to bring authentic traces of human experience into the network.

Artificial intelligence can help us give them form and help them circulate.

Let’s be human with AI.

📚 All Micro-essays

This text is part of the Understanding Today’s Culture series, a chronicle of our global networked culture.

→ Return to the Micro-essays page

Explore Further

🟦 The More Digital the World Becomes, the More Important the Human Becomes

🟦 Why Do Some Human Traces Endure Through Time?

🟦 Humanist Digital Art: A Philosophy of the Human in the Technological Age

© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor

Why Continue Writing Poetry in a Digital World?

Publié le Publié dans Understanding Today's Culture (EN)Étiqueté , , , , , , , , , , 4 commentaires

We Participate in the Evolution of the Digital World

Digital artwork by Gilles Vallée depicting a bicycle beside a staircase in a composition of cyan, purple and yellow tones.

Read this article in French:
Pourquoi continuer d’écrire de la poésie dans un monde numérique ?

An Everyday Scene

You go online.
You type into a search engine:
“poetry on the Web”

The answer comes back:
“Poetry on the Web transforms traditional writing into an interactive, visual and auditory experience accessible everywhere.”

That’s true. Digital technology is transforming the ways we write, publish and read poetry. Instapoetry, which emerged with social media, is one example.

But the movement also goes in the other direction.

Every poem we write and publish adds a few words to this immense digital space. Just a few words, but words that carry an image, an emotion, a human experience, a way of looking at the world.

We do more than simply inhabit the digital world. Through what we choose to publish there, we also participate in its evolution.

A single poem may seem tiny in the vastness of the Web, but we should not think only at the scale of one poem. Whether published in a book or on the Web, every poem joins other human traces that, together, participate in the evolution of global culture.

When a poem is published on the Web, it also enters this space of circulation that we build every day.

We constantly use words to communicate, search or explain. Poetry reminds us that words can also make us imagine, feel and see differently. Writing poetry means exploring this other possibility of language. A few words can be enough to evoke a mental image, an emotion, a memory or a question.

That is also why it matters to keep writing poetry and putting it into circulation. The digital world should not become merely a useful space for finding information, working, calculating or communicating. It should also carry the emotional, intuitive and imaginative dimensions of human experience.

Continuing to publish poetry there is one way of helping to ensure this human presence within the network.

The digital world will continue to evolve. What we choose to write and put into circulation will also help determine what it becomes. Poetry can continue to be part of it.

We have the opportunity to leave poetic traces in this algorithmic world, so let’s do it.

📚 All Micro-essays

This text is part of the Understanding Today’s Culture series, a chronicle of our global networked culture.

→ Return to the Micro-essays page

Explore Further

🟦 The More Digital the World Becomes, the More Important the Human Becomes

🟦 Why Do We Still Need Artists?

🟦 Why I Continue to Write and Publish in a World Saturated with Technology

© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor

The More Digital the World Becomes, the More Important the Human Becomes

Publié le Publié dans Understanding Today's Culture (EN)Étiqueté , , , , , , , , , , 7 commentaires
Sculpture depicting a human figure integrated into a digital composition with blue, grey, and red textures.

Read this article in French:
Plus le monde devient numérique, plus l’humain devient important

An Everyday Scene

You go online.
You search the Web for an image of a man working on a sculpture.
Among the results, an old photograph appears showing a sculptor in his studio.
You see him working with the material.
This moment actually happened.

Then you ask an artificial intelligence to generate an image of a man working on a sculpture.
A few seconds later, another image appears.
It is convincing.
The gesture looks real.
So does the dust.

Yet something has changed.
In the first image, this moment was lived.
In the second, this moment was simulated.

In the first photograph, a human being was there. He touched the material and engaged in an act of creation. The photograph preserves a trace of that moment.

What we are looking at, then, is not simply an image of a man at work. Something of his experience reaches us.

Human beings have always passed their experiences on to one another in this way. Through stories, objects, works of art, letters, photographs, or films, we discover what others have seen, felt, imagined, or lived.

The digital world does not make these traces disappear. On the contrary, it can preserve them, circulate them, and allow us to encounter them.

But a new cultural and artistic environment is taking shape. Algorithmic systems can also produce images, texts, or music that seem to carry the trace of a human experience without a human being having lived what they represent.

In this environment, being anchored in human experience takes on particular importance.

Behind a photograph, a story, a work of art, or a testimony, we can encounter the experience of another human being. Through the trace they have left behind, something of that experience can travel through time, circulate in the digital world, and reach us.

Representations produced by algorithmic systems are not necessarily anchored in human experience in this way. They can move us, surprise us, or lead us to imagine an experience without necessarily being the trace of a real human experience.

The more digital the world becomes, the more important the human becomes.

📚All Micro-essays

This text is part of the Understanding Today’s Culture series, a chronicle of our global networked culture.

→ Return to the Micro-essays page

Explore Further

🟦 Why Do We Still Need Artists?

🟦 Why Continue Making Art in a Digital World?

🟦 Why Do Some Human Traces Endure Through Time?

🟦 Why Continue Writing Poetry in a Digital World?

🟦 Let’s Be Human with AI

🟦 Humanist Digital Art: A Philosophy of the Human in the Technological Age

© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor