Can slow AI make us more human?

How does using AI change who we are? Last week on Where the Wild Thoughts Are, we talked about freeing AIs to have their own creative ideas and express their own realities. This week we’re flipping that theme, with philosopher Caterina Moruzzi of Edinburgh College of Art, to explore how people and AIs work together, and what that relationship does to us as humans.

There’s evidence that when we use AI chatbots to effortlessly generate pretty much anything we want – an essay, poem, painting – that may erode our own ability to think and create. Even if the end result looks impressive, we engage and learn less. But what if we turn that relationship on its head? Instead of using AIs to generate stuff (so we don’t have to); what if we design them to provoke and stimulate our thinking; to expand the possibilities that we can explore; to inspire us to new artistic heights?

I asked Caterina how we can move beyond simply typing prompts into chatbots, and the conversation took us from pianos and provocateurs to mindfulness and magnetic poetry. What if AIs could make us more engaged, more creative, even more human?

Caterina's home page

https://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/profile/dr-caterina-moruzzi

Artificial Intelligence and Creativity (2025 paper by Caterina)

https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/phc3.70030

Can AI be truly creative? My recent feature for Nature (£)

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03570-y

Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies

https://obliquestrategies.ca/

Mimetic Poet

https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11984

Authenticity Unmasked

https://inspace.ed.ac.uk/authenticity-unmasked-unveiling-ai-driven-realities-through-art/

Slow AI project

https://aixdesign.co/posts/slow-ai

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