The dream is the confusion machine I didn't have to build, a space where perception slips beyond authorship. Within Communal Dreams, influence operates as a subtle signal rather than a directive force.
"It's bizarre to watch people in this way - even in gay cruising areas you wouldn't stare at other bodies this intensely. Now, whenever I go to a concert, especially at the Berliner Philharmonie with its encircling seating, my gaze hovers over the audience as well as the stage."
Seeing the Alhambra in Granada was an extraordinary experience for me. It was the first time that I understood painting as something other than an object hanging on a wall. I thought that paintings could be in a fixed place, made for that place, made for the light of the place, experienced kinesthetically.
Yale came to me and said there isn't an overarching book about the history of printmaking; they wanted it to be about the printed image. There are a lot of books about printing-about the history of journalism or the history of books, the printing press and the printed word-but not so much about the printed image and its processes. So that was my challenge.
There's a particular kind of panic that hits when you're facing a creative problem, and the well just feels... empty. Every idea seems stale. Every solution feels recycled. And the question creeps in: Have I finally used up all my good ideas? Maybe it's your third attempt at solving the same design problem, and every solution feels like a pale echo of something you've already tried. Or perhaps you've been churning out work for months, and suddenly the spark you used to rely on? Gone.
As AI systems become more capable, more accessible, and more embedded in everyday workflows, creativity is emerging as one of the most important human skills in AI development and deployment. Not creativity as decoration or aesthetics, but creativity as problem framing, decision-making, and human judgment. In an era where many organizations are using the same models, tools, and platforms, creative thinking is what separates meaningful outcomes from generic ones.
When a scientist feeds a data set into a bot and says "give me hypotheses to test", they are asking the bot to be the creator, not a creative partner. Humans tend to defer to ideas produced by bots, assuming that the bot's knowledge exceeds their own. And, when they do, they end up exploring fewer avenues for possible solutions to their problem.
Poetry and artificial intelligence can appear as oppositesone deeply human; the other cold and mechanical. Sasha Stiles sees them as expressions of the same impulse. Poetry, the Kalmyk- American poet argues, is one of our most ancient and enduring technologies, a system of meter and rhyme invented to store vital information. She views AI as its natural heir. Stiles's path to AI began with literature, not code.
Recently, AI decided that a painting long thought to be a copy of Caravaggio's The Lute Player is actually by the master, while another version of the same subject, previously thought to be authentic, is not. Both conclusions were disputed by the former Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Keith Christiansen. A similar debate erupted in March 2025 when AI declared that portions of The Bath of Diana, also long believed to be a copy, could have been painted by Peter Paul Rubens.