Ancient Art to AI

The human experience is at the heart of these fields.

How did I go from working in art museums to working with AI researchers?

It’s not as much as a stretch as you may think. It all comes down to deep curiosity about the human experience and our common values.

What is truth? What is reality? What does it mean to be human? These are the questions my high school art teacher would pose to our class at the beginning of each school year. Thanks to that great teacher, I still ask these questions all the time.

I think these are questions a lot of people are asking, whether they are phrased that way or more nuanced or even masked. That’s why we turn to art, music, technology, and each other for connection and insight. And when we do, we often find something to inspire us and allow us to feel part of something bigger than ourselves. Connection allows us to view ourselves as part of the greater story of humanity — the story of great masterpieces and world-changing innovations, the story of perseverance through struggle, the story of searching for meaning and consequence.

At the heart of art history is the question of what it means to be human. Art goes back far beyond the written word, tracing human history back tens of thousands of years, and the study of art allows us to look at what humans have been most concerned with over a long span of time. It helps us ponder: What questions have we always been asking ourselves? What have we been interested in celebrating and preserving? What stories do we tell, time and time again?

From my own study of art history, what I’ve come to see is that we are not so different from humans who lived thousands of years ago. Humans have always sought love and knowledge, and we have always strived to innovate and expand our world. (I promise I’m getting to my point…)

So it’s not surprising to me that we are at the precipice of another major leap in technology and innovation when it comes to artificial intelligence. At this pivotal time, when AI is proliferating and becoming more widely adopted and we are becoming more aware of it, it’s especially important to keep asking questions that keep humans and human values at the core of technological advancement.

After all, no matter how much we anthropomorphize technologies such as chatbots like ChatGPT, Siri, and Alexa, or any robots we interact with, humans are at both ends of the spectrum — as the designers and developers and the users. It’s human to human work, and we’re all connected in it. We need the feedback loops and the mirrors we hold to ourselves, like works of art, to help us unpack how technology is changing our lives and environments together as a community.

My art history and museum experience have prepared me to ask what can make AI ethical and human-centered. I’ve had a number of professional experiences in communications, outreach, and partnership development that have also prepared me, but I posit the way I think about and approach my work has been most significantly shaped by the tools art education has given me. (This might also be an argument for how art education can blend nicely with highly technical work.) I believe that every organization and company needs someone (or a team) who will ask the big questions, connect the big picture to the daily details and the short-term to the long-term, and prioritize the values we have in common.

What is truth? What is reality? What does it mean to be human?

We are grappling with these questions as a society today, as we have always been. But we now ask these questions within a landscape of generative tools, service robots, robotic health care tools, algorithm-driven news and entertainment, and new challenges in communication, privacy, and data collection and curation.

In my next posts, I’ll explore how the art and AI worlds are coming together and dive deeper into how they can help each other as well as examine strategies for identifying shared values.

In the meantime, I invite you to read more about a few of the questions I’ve been asking, and let me know what questions the proliferation of AI raises for you!