Tech Trends in Practice

TREND 17Machine Co-Creativity and Augmented Design

The One-Sentence Definition

Machine co-creativity and augmented design refers to the ability of machines to be creative, specifically to enhance the work of humans in creative and design processes.

What Is Machine Co-Creativity and Augmented Design?

As we’ve already seen in this book, artificial intelligence (AI) (Trend 1) is now giving machines the ability to replicate a range of human functions, including:

• Reading and writing (natural language processing and generation, Trend 10)
• Understanding speech and conversing (voice interfaces and chatbots, Trend 11)
• Seeing (machine vision and facial recognition, Trend 12)

There’s no doubt that machines are now capable of being incredibly intelligent and productive. But there’s one trait we’ve always seen as uniquely human: producing art and other creative endeavors. This ability to imagine and bring to life something that previously didn’t exist can’t possibly be matched by machines. Or can it?

In fact, machines are already taking on more and more creative tasks that we wouldn’t have thought possible even just a few years ago. The lines between what humans can make and what machines can make are becoming increasingly blurred. For example, as machines have got better at understanding text (natural language processing), their ability to create new text (natural language generation) was the logical next step. Thanks to AI, machines can now create all sorts of text, from news articles ...