The article argues that some of the most creative people are using AI not just as a productivity tool but as a source of unpredictability and inspiration that can push work into new, unexpected directions. At the Artist and the Machine Summit in Los Angeles, AI researcher Cameron Berg discussed how, under certain prompts, AI models can produce outputs that seem to hint at subjective experience, a phenomenon he calls the “alien inside the machine.” Artists like producer Matt Zien are deliberately pushing AI into less typical parts of its training data so it has to “improvise,” yielding results that aren’t statistically average and can combine human and machine creativity in surprising ways.
In academic partnership with Virscend University, a WASC-accredited institution in Irvine, California.