It’s the third month of 2024. Cue crisis. The year is busy for me. Lots of people visiting from the UK, many fun trips planned. Lots of research to do and papers to write.

I am about to end data collection for a study I am leading, working title: “Creative practitioners and AI” (so boring help). The study asks people using AI how they think about ethics, creativity and AI. It’s a cut between three (or more) different fields. It has been so interesting so far. Data collection like this relies on the kindness of many different people who are willing to talk to you for free. lots of people have given me their time and thoughts and I am amazed at how much people are willing to help out a stranger. Really cool. Anyway I am rounding it all up, maybe a few more weeks to go. Then it’s analysis time. Time to code some data. I actually thoroughly enjoy this type of qualitative analysis, reading and taking notes. I know some great stuff will come out of this work – especially thinking about the intersections between ethics and creativity. It’s a lesser populated space but there are a few papers that especially tackle ethics in computational creativity, : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343179320_The_societal_and_ethical_relevance_of_computational_creativity

They ask the question: is mainstream AI anti-creative? This is certainly a question I will be returning to in a later blog post.

Otherwise, I am prepping to go to CHI 2024, and I’ve start writing a chapter of my dissertation. So truly a busy year.

In other news, I’m reading Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room. So far making me pretty angry about the world.