I was flattered to be invited to be a keynote speaker at the 1st Workshop on Data Craft as Boundary AI Practice workshop which was held this week.
I decided to use the Arts and Crafts movement, which emerged as artistans offered a counterpoint tot he reduced quality and loss of traditional skills that was brought about by industrial mass production, as a lens to look at the adoption of generative AI.
GenAI has democratised our relationship with data, the defining creative and economic material of the 21st century. Almost overnight, our relationship with data has transformed, becoming something anyone can massage, manipulate, make beautiful, harness, control, and vibe with.
But meanwhile it also seems to undermine creativity, produces large amounts of ‘slop’, and reduces (or at least changes!) our notion of quality.
The only constant here seems to be change.
Opening slide from Cristina’s talk
In the other keynote presentation Cristina Zaga offered a fantastically well researched set of perspectives built around resistance and reclaiming agency in a world so influenced by data. I was pleased to see Cristina has adopted a similar set of rhetoric to what I have when framing the present day’s obsession with scientistic views, the echoes of the enlightenment and industrial revolution ring strong (you can read a bit about that in this paper).
