Practice Health: A Better Way to Evaluate AI Tools
Most AI tools are evaluated on what they produce. Is the image good? Is the text accurate? Is the output novel? These are reasonable questions, but they miss something important — whether the person using the tool can sustain a working relationship with it over time. I spent four years studying how creative practitioners (artists,…
The Bugs Have Opinions About Your Digital Fate
I made a horoscope website. But the stars are bugs. And the bugs have opinions. Fate Bug started because I love silly horoscope websites, but wanted to build something with a little digital twist. It’s a personality quiz dressed up as a mystical experience, designed to tell you which AI tool you should use based…
Designing for Onboarding to AI tools 🙂
We spent ten weeks following a professional artist as she used generative AI for the first time. She came in with seven years of experience across oil painting, collage, and sculpture, but had never touched a text-to-image tool. We wanted to understand what that process actually looks like when it unfolds naturally, without tutorials or…
2 Years On: Reflections on the AI Ethics
Two years ago I had the pleasure of working alongside my supervisor and a fellow PhD student to develop and publish a typology of risk regarding generative text to image models. I think it is time to reflect on the changes that have occurred since we wrote the paper 🙂 (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.05543) Perhaps the most significant…
My Top 5 Books of 2025
This year I’ve read 100 books, around one every 4 days. Not crazy, but a little goal I set myself since I like to tell people I love to read, then forget how much I actually do love to read. I keep track via Goodreads, and here are my top 5 of the year. Blindness…
December 2025: What Am I Doing?
Applying to jobs. Fun! I have a year of funding left but I know exactly what I want to do, so I’m getting a jump start. Give myself a year of runway, right? I’m also writing my thesis (word count 56,000 … 56,001… 56,002…). I am also getting papers ready for submission. Got a lot…
Is mainstream AI anti-creative?
Why would AI tools designed specifically for processes we call creative, not be creative? Firstly, interesting creative action often happens when things get broken, or they glitch. Art happens when things break. Not all art of course, but cool stuff can happen when things don’t work as they aren’t meant to. However, this is a…
March 2024: What am I doing?
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…