From DALI to DALL:E - The SpeakAisy.

The inspiration for my latest project came from a 1965 moment, where Salvador Dali appeared at the United Nations with the greatest flamenco singer of his time, Jose Reyes, and the remarkable guitarist Manitas de Plata (Little Silver Hands). Their performance wasn’t perfectly captured by the cameras, but it preserved something powerful—a moment where creative genius met the world stage, attempting to share a deep cultural legacy.

As a playwright and a lecturer in Digital Culture at Royal Holloway, I am always intrigued by the essence of creativity and performance. Writing plays helps me see that humans are fascinated by imitation—we love to perform. Through imitation, we probe the enigma of our own consciousness and confront an inescapable fact: we are aware of our own mortality.

This realisation is the driving force behind drama, and theatre itself, which has been humanity's technological tool for 2,500 years, designed to investigate the gray areas of our consciousness. It is the perfect tool for investigating that other grey area of conciousness AI.

This led me to a question: Could performance, combined with AI, help us explore the magic and loss each this new generation of technology brings? What if we replaced Salvador Dali with Open AI’s DALL-E in a live, time-based performance?

Enter the SpeakAisy: A New Kind of Artistic Collaboration

This is how the SpeakAisy was born. Instead of Manitas de Plata, we had a 5-piece jazz band. Instead of Jose Reyes, we worked with spoken word poets. And instead of Salvador Dali, we integrated Chat GPT’s API, paired with Python code to interpret the subtext of the poems and paint what it heard.

The result was an entirely new experience for the performers and the audience. Musicians and poets had never collaborated with AI before, and for the audience, it was captivating to witness the AI interpret and create in real-time. There was a delay between the spoken word and the images generated—about 30 seconds—causing a unique dissonance. Sometimes it was funny, sometimes confusing, but it was always making something utterly new.

At one point, the mention of death in a poem triggered Open AI’s safety protocols, a reminder of the machine’s own San Francisco based programming bias. We held a brilliant discussion at the end. Do we even have the vocabulary to talk about something that feels half alive when you use it? Is AI the greatest plagiarism machine ever created, or the ultimate creative toolbox? If AI is always looks back for data is it in the same reality as us?

Marshall McLuhan’s Media Tetrad: Understanding AI’s Impact

Reflecting on the SpeakAisy, I turned to Marshall McLuhan’s media tetrad to understand what AI could mean for creativity. McLuhan identified four effects every new technology has on society: Enhance, Obsolesce, Retrieve, and Reverse.

This is knowledge that our Improvised AI garnered.

• Enhance: AI enhances accessibility to art. Tools like DALL-E make creativity feel more achievable, amplifying our sense of mastery. There’s also an element of unpredictability and play that draws audiences in— every 30 seconds a new interpretation of the poets words appreared. It was like a fruit machine spinning it's reels.
• Obsolesce: The friction that traditionally comes with creative work—revisions, challenges, and labor—may become obsolete with AI. This friction, though tough, often deepens the meaning of creative work. Without it, AI art can feel superficial, like a beautiful but hollow Jeff Koons sculpture.
• Retrieve: AI reconnects us with the power of words. Historically, spoken language was a tool to evoke emotion and shape reality, and now, generative AI makes that power visible in new ways. This can feel magical, reminiscent of oral storytelling traditions.
• Reverse: As AI becomes more ubiquitous, there’s a risk that we lose the drive to create, leaving us to question the value of originality. If AI can generate anything instantly, will everything start to feel formulaic even art that was difficult to make?

Conclusion: Where Does This Leave Us?

The SpeakAisy was a journey into the unknown—a blending of old and new technologies to explore what AI means for creativity. It taught us that AI is not just a mimic but an alien technology with its own processes and rhythms. It also revealed that while AI can enhance our creative capabilities, it still lacks the true friction that human creativity brings to art.

For those already skilled in their craft, AI can be an incredible tool to push the boundaries of creativity. But if you don't have base skills perpahs AI make us lazier.

We have grown used to the idea of the Turing Test, how long before we have to ask our art the DALI test. Is it a human peice of art.

#CamGenAIinEd2024