Take a Chance

Many people ask about the prompt, but the prompt is not what creates a successful outcome. It’s the process of curation - picking and choosing from what is delivered to you. Running many iterations. Recognizing when the process is leading to disintegration. And oftentimes, being surprised by what you receive and running with it. Isn't this what the design process is all about, regardless of the tools? A play between our minds eye and manifestation? A war of our will to determine the outcome and the serendipity of circumstances?

Midjourney Monday, October 24, 2022

Once I had learned the techniques, my first personal explorations in Midjourney were games of chance. I would enter prompts and simply press the rerun button over and over and over again until something caught my attention. In many ways, it was like playing the lottery. There was very little skill involved in what I was doing. I had very little control, but what I could do was play the odds. With each word I was conjuring up a million parameters of data, with four that’s a zillion. Somewhere in that vast array, there had to be one idea worth pursuing, and when I found it, it felt like magic.?

The question was, could I find it again?

?

We often think of games of chance as having no rules—pure luck, happenstance, serendipity, one in a million. But what we know from AI is that the algorithms of chance are as codified as those of recipes. They are the rules of statistics. Whether it’s picking a lotto ball out of a glass chamber or encountering a long-lost friend on the street, many of the chance encounters we experience are governed by probabilities—a numerator expressing how many times you play and a denominator expressing how many variables exist in the game.

Taking a Chance with Ideas

While many people are trying to figure out how to “harness” AI—to automate, to regulate—I’m obsessed with its chaos. As we attempt to wrangle generative AI to behave so it can automate functions, I fear we will miss out on perhaps the greatest opportunity: to take a chance that chaos is the order we need. As I said in a recent debate on AI at Tufts University’s Gordon Institute:

I think we’re in a very important moment where it hasn’t quite jumped the shark yet, and we have an opportunity to have a critical conversation about how we embrace chaos. If you allow that temperature setting to be relaxed . . . that is where I think we have the potential for innovation.

?

I’m not the only one who embraces chaos. Visionary entrepreneur Richard Branson attributes his success to the ingenuity of his dyslexic mind. Dyslexia has been commonly stigmatized as a reading disorder because it’s typically diagnosed as children begin learning how to process language. However, what we’ve come to understand about dyslexic brains is that they are structurally different in fascinating ways.

When children learn to read, their brains form efficient pathways to process language, to the point that it becomes automatic. Dyslexic brains have more circuitous pathways. They wander to more places in the brain, which makes reading five times harder. But for Branson, he sees this as a personal strength when it comes to innovation.

Dyslexic brains circumvent uncertainty—they skip logical steps and make remote connections. Branson relied on this embrace of chaos to expand Virgin from music to airlines, two industries that were at opposite ends of the spectrum. His intuitive leaps defied conventional wisdom. At the time, it was unheard of for a company to be invested in such different industries, and yet Branson was able to see the common thread. Introducing fun into tired industries was a connection his brain made easily. He could see relationships that others could not.

Innovation often arises from such unexpected leaps and unlikely collisions. As author Matt Ridley put it, “Ideas have sex.” Discovery happens when distinct concepts randomly meet and recombine into something new. Chance itself becomes creative. Leonardo da Vinci is well known for his art, but he was also an ingenious inventor filling sketchbooks with a fusion of art, anatomy, and engineering, three domains previously isolated. His improbable mental mashups birthed futuristic designs, such as a helicopter that was conceived as a theatrical structure inspired by a mechanic’s screw.

Engineering serendipity

Engineering the serendipitous encounter of ideas was also a driving principle when I was working as a university planner. It used to be that departments were organizational structures where people focusing on similar research could convene. Doctorates are awarded for specializations within a narrow field, and it was assumed that this structure, including locating like-minded people in offices adjacent to one another, would drive scholarship. However, it is now widely recognized that academic innovation happens when a chemist and a linguist meet and have a casual conversation.

While the structure of departments is deeply entrenched, we looked for opportunities in the hallways, the restrooms, the lounges, and even the stairways to orchestrate chances for ideas to encounter one another in new and interesting ways.?At the University of Michigan’s Biomedical Research Building, this was done by creating open laboratory spaces where researchers across a wide variety of scientific and medical disciplines were assigned benches within large labs, sharing common resources. The opportunity for serendipitous interactions was extended to common lounges, meeting rooms, and an expansive atrium with walkways that maximized the potential for the unexpected.

Whether it is chaos orchestrated by a machine, the structure of a brain, or the organization of spaces in non-linear ways, there is no doubt that new ideas thrive when given an environment that allows them to be randomly selected, to take the longer divergent path, and to collide. That can happen through the laws of nature, and it can also be designed by architects and scientists.

Controlled Chaos

We are at a moment when AI systems are getting better and better at giving humans the reins, and that's great for productivity. I'm all about taking control of the things we can control, and that also means taking responsibility for our human acts. But I also challenge you to use AI to take some risks, to explore the periphery of its data sets, to maximize the potential of weirdness. Be queer with AI.

Control....that's so 2021.

So, friends, we've come to the end of our series. If you are just joining the Humans of AI newsletter, which is newsletter that contains absolutely no breaking news, you might want to check out the other articles in this series. These are all excerpts from my book TEMPERATURE: Creativity in the Age of AI which comes out in two weeks!

And if you haven't heard, I'm hosting a hot ass party (the name of my imprint is HOT ASS PRESS) on March 7, both virtually and IRL. And my goal is to assemble a group of the most random, weird, intelligent, chaotic, and methodical (if you are chaotic and methodical, even better!) people on LinkedIn for one night of ice cold beers, mixed up cocktails, and hot mulled wine (recipe courtesy of Paru Radia, C-Suite Whisperer? the C-suite whisperer).

Guests will get a copy of the book one month before it goes live on Amazon and I promise you that if you've gotten to this point in the newsletter, you will love it.

You can purchase tickets here .

I'm Lori Mazor and I teach AI with a human touch, empowering intelligent business. If you enjoy this newsletter, whatever you do, don't....

• Join me virtually or in-person on March 7, 2024 for the launch of TEMPERATURE: Creativity in the Age of AI. Pre-sale tickets come with a copy of the book.
• Register for the Generative AI Bootcamp. Our next Level I cohort kicks off on Saturday, March 9 (12-2PM EST) and Level II on Friday, March 15 (3-5 EST).
• Invite me to speak at your company event or lead a training session. Our new roster of courses is available for executives, managers, and developers.