About the book

Surfing human creativity with AI
— A user’s guide

AI is upon us, poised to wreak havoc on virtually every labor sector. Humanity’s saving grace, we are told, is that we’re creative, whereas AI is not. This book, by noted AI Ph.D., and internationally recognized award-winning musician and AI artist, asserts that AI proposes a new creative field of fostering myriad ancillary forms of creativity, and that these forms of “alternative intelligence” propose a creative renaissance and prosperous future.

The book functions as a sort of artist’s notebook, how Tokui came to his understandings from creating using AI, topical examples from AI in creative industries, common mistakes to avoid in understanding the problems before us, fun anecdotal ways for understanding creativity and AI from literature, music, and painting history, and apparent contradictions with how we, as a society, tend to approach creative practices. The book frees us from preconceptions about what we need to do to move forward, creatively, in an age of AI, with specific examples from leading creatives using AI, including detailed explanations based on the author’s own work.

Surfing human creativity with AI — a user’s guide is a fun read and a gateway to a meta-universe of new meta-universes where each of us can explore and thrive.



《Translated and revised from the 2021 Japanese Book — Winner of the Okawa Publishing Award 2021》

About the Author

Nao Tokui

Artist / Researcher, Ph.D. (Engineering)

Nao Tokui is an artist, DJ, AI technology researcher, and visiting associate professor at Keio University, Tokyo. After completing his Ph.D., in 2009, he founded the AI Creativity and Music Lab Qosmo, Inc., whose output has been exhibited at venues including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, and the Barbican Centre, London. Tokui/Qosmo’s performances employing AI have been showcased at music festivals including MUTEK and Sónar. Tokui is currently leading development of AI technologies for audio creators at Neutone Inc.

徳井 直生 nao tokui

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1

AI cannot be an artist.

  • 1.1

    To make is to understand

  • 1.2

    Pictures drawn ‘by’ AI

  • 1.3

    AI Intention and execution

  • 1.4

    AI is more than a tool

Chapter 2

The Library of Babel
— Thinking about the nature of creativity through AI

  • 2.1

    Creation and The Library of Babel

  • 2.2

    Creativity from a computer’s perspective

  • 2.3

    Text generation by AI
    — Burroughs, Bowie, and GPT-3

  • 2.4

    Performance generation, sound generation, procedure generation

  • 2.5

    “Machines Can Produce Nothing”?
    — 19C AI

  • 2.6

    Evolution and creativity
    — A Genetic Library of Babel

  • 2.7

    For AI to generate its own creativity

Chapter 3

A history of AI, Simulacra, and simulation

  • 3.1

    Edison’s Turing Test

  • 3.2

    (AI Hibari Misora) Doppelgangers and Impersonators

  • 3.3

    A failure to replicate changed global pop

  • 3.4

    Photography and painting
    — Imitation ≥ flattery

  • 3.5

    The painter whose art was a mirror he himself was inside

Chapter 4

AI Aesthetics
— The Impact of AI on Expression

  • 4.1

    The Peacock’s Tail
    — Optimization pitfalls

  • 4.2

    Sinatra doo be doo be no do no K-POP

  • 4.3

    “Seeds” over “artifacts”
    — The dissolution of fixed “works”

Chapter 5

Tips for working creatively with AI

  • 5.1

    Connecting disparate phenomena

  • 5.2

    Cultivating the uncanny

  • 5.3

    Embracing heterogeneity

  • 5.4

    Value misconversion

  • 5.5

    Tips for creatively interacting with AI

Afterword

創るためのAI 徳井 直生

Surfing human creativity with AI — A user’s guide

  • ISBN:978-1-304-83195-8
  • List price:19 USD
  • Specifications:A5 / 174 pages
  • Author: Nao Tokui
  • Translation: David d’Heilly
  • Design: Yurie Hata
  • Cover Illustration: Shoya Dozono
Okawa Publishing Award

The original Japanese book received the Okawa Publishing Award (30th Edition, 2021), which honors outstanding books in the field of information and communications.
Please click here for details.

To encourage as many people as possible to join this journey, the author has decided to offer the entire book in PDF format free of charge. Feel free to download the file and share it with your friends and colleagues. The PDF is made available under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
For more information about the book, please contact: contact@qosmo.jp

Selected talks
by the author

Nao Tokui: Surfing Musical Creativity with AI (The Gradient Podcast)
Nao Tokui: "Surfing" Musical Creativity with AI (The Gradient Podcast)
Performing with AI — AI as Alternative Intelligence and Human Creativity in Music (at AIMC, AI Music Creativity conference 2022)
AI DJ Project — The Documentary (2022)